


Company Man

by Rainne



Category: NCIS
Genre: F/M, Kate Todd is the fandom bike, ship Kate with all the things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-07-08
Updated: 2014-02-12
Packaged: 2018-01-12 03:43:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 25,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1181475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rainne/pseuds/Rainne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He told her they would meet again soon; she wasn't sure what he meant by that until he turned her life upside down.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Before he dropped her off on a crowded Georgetown street, he had given her an indecipherable look and said five words to her that she has not been able to get out of her head since: “We will meet again soon.”

What the hell, she wonders when she thinks about those words, did he mean by that?

After calling Agent Baer to give him the heads up on the terrorist situation, she had been hustled into the same car she arrived at the farmhouse in, and Ari had gotten behind the wheel. He had insisted that she turn her cell phone off again, and he had taken her back into the city, driving aimlessly for the better part of an hour before finally pulling over to a curb in front of a coffee shop. “This is where you get out,” he told her when she stared at him.

She had been able to retain the presence of mind not to protest, even though it was her initial instinct. _But this can’t be over that easily_ , she had wanted to say. _You can’t possibly just… drop me off here like this. It doesn’t work that way_. She had said none of those things; instead, she had collected her purse from the floorboard and climbed out.

“Caitlin,” he had called to her, and she’d turned automatically, leaning over to look at him through the window like someone who’d just been dropped off somewhere. Utterly unlike someone who’d just been held hostage for most of an afternoon and forced to watch as a group of terrorists went off to try and kidnap the President. “We will meet again soon,” he had promised.

And what had she done? Had she scoffed? Told him that if she never saw him again, it would be too soon? Told him that when their next meeting came, he would meet up with the business end of her service weapon? No, she had done none of those things; instead, she had nodded, like someone who has just been told something incredibly ordinary, and she had straightened again, watching as he drove away, and then slipping into the coffee shop.

She’d hidden there until well past dark, drinking white chocolate mochas and pondering the existential nature of double agents. Or possibly staring into space and thinking about his eyes.

We will meet again soon.

What the hell, she wonders, did he mean by that?

She goes back to her job and her life after that day, pausing only briefly to assure the agency headshrinker that she is in fact fine, that she has dealt with her emotions in a healthy manner (she tells him about the journaling and the meditation; she doesn’t tell him about the pint of Chubby Hubby or the afternoon of retail therapy that did something horrifying to her American Express bill). She moves on, or so she tells everyone around her.

She doesn’t try to tell that to herself; one of the few things Caitlin Todd never practices is self-deception. It’s a policy.

Life goes on, she tells herself, and when the one-month anniversary of the last time she saw Ari Haswari passes with no sign of him, she looks for a new hobby and takes up jiu-jitsu. (She thought about taking up belly dancing, but decided she didn’t want to take that kind of grief from Tony.)

Thus it happens that, at eight-thirty on a Thursday evening, Caitlin Todd enters her apartment, sweaty and slightly bruised and badly in need of a shower, to find Ari Haswari sitting on her sofa and watching the news on ZNN as though it were the most normal thing in the world – as though he belongs to be on her sofa with his jacket hanging on her coat rack.

She shuts the door behind her and he turns to face her as though he does not realize how out of place he is, how odd his black-clad form looks in her shades-of-neutral space. “Did you enjoy your class this evening?”

Somehow, she is not surprised that he knew where she was. “Yes,” she says, hanging her gym bag on the coat rack next to his leather jacket.

“Good,” he replies, and then he waves a hand toward the kitchen. “I brought food, if you wish to eat after your shower.”

She is standing in the shower with the warm water cascading over her body before her brain catches up. Ari Haswari is in her apartment. Ari Haswari is sitting on her sofa. Ari Haswari… brought dinner?

She steps out of the shower again, dries quickly and dresses in a tee shirt and safari shorts, and pads back out into the living room while running a brush through her wet hair. He is still sitting on her sofa, still watching the news on ZNN, still pretending this is normal. “Why are you here?”

“I told you that I would come,” he points out. “Did I not? I said that I would see you soon.”

“Three months ago,” she replies with some asperity. “And I didn’t think you meant it like this.”

“Would you have preferred I found a reason to kidnap you again?” he asks reasonably. “There is food in the kitchen, Caitlin. I am certain that you are hungry. You should eat.”

She tosses the brush onto her bed and goes into the kitchen. He brought KFC. It’s still hot.

She fills a plate – she really is hungry – and goes back into the living room, folding herself into a chair and studying him. “Why are you here?” she asks again, and he turns the television off and studies her in return.

“Why did you not call Gibbs from the bathroom to come and rescue you from me?” he asks in return. “Why did you not come back out with your gun and demand that I leave? Why are you eating the food that I brought?”

Reasonable questions, all of them. Questions that Gibbs himself would ask, were he here to see her sitting in this room with this man, eating his food like it’s the most normal thing in the world.

“I…” Her words trail off as she realizes that she has no answer to this question. “I don’t know.”

“When you know,” he says, studying her with those hot black eyes, “you will understand why I am here.”

There isn’t much she can say to that. “Are you in town long?” she finally asks.

“Not very long,” he replies. “I have a flight out tomorrow at noon.”

“Where do you go from here?”

He shrugs. “Wherever I am sent.”

She swallows a forkful of mashed potatoes and considers that. “You’re really Mossad?” she asks.

He nods. “I am.”

“Are you Jewish?” she wonders, curious because according to the profile she has on him, his mother was a Palestinian Arab.

“No,” he replies. “Neither am I a Muslim, as I am certain you already guessed. I suppose, if you must have a label for my religion, you may call me agnostic.”

She studies him for a long moment, while he simply looks at her calmly. “I don’t know what to say to you,” she finally says. “I mean… I don’t understand what’s going on. Why you’re here. Anything, really. I just…” Her voice trails off, and she sighs into the sudden silence, then pauses to shake her head at herself. “I’m thrown,” she confesses, “and it’s turning me into one of those women who never knows when to shut up.”

He grins at that, wide and open, and she sees in him something of the man he might have been if he had not had to become a spy and a double agent. “Your honesty is, as always, refreshing,” he tells her. Then he stands. He walks toward her, his step sure but slow, and he is careful not to startle her. She keeps her eyes on his face the whole time, and when he lays his palm on her cheek, she is not surprised, because she saw the contact coming. “I am here, Caitlin,” he says softly, “because I wanted to see you.”

Before she can reply, he has turned and walked away. He pauses at the door to turn and face her, and he speaks again, those same five words. “We will meet again soon,” he says, and he slips out of her apartment and out of her life.

He left his jacket on her coat rack. He left his scent in her air, and he left his touch burning the side of her face. She sits in that chair, holding her plate in her lap, for a very long time after he is gone.

What the hell, she wonders, did he mean by _that_?

\---

She considers telling Gibbs about her strange visitor. It’s the sort of thing, she thinks sarcastically to herself, he’d really want to know about.

The conversation runs through her head, a million little variants, as she gets ready to go to work the next morning. All of these variants start with the same line: “Gibbs, when I got home last night, Ari Haswari was in my apartment.” They all take slightly different paths from there, but they all end explosively when the Gibbs in her mind demands to know why she didn’t call him immediately and have him come over and shoot the bastard dead.

By the time she makes it to the office, she is pretty certain she isn’t going to tell Gibbs about her evening. Not that it matters; he has other things on his mind when she arrives than worrying about whether or not she had company last night.

There is a woman sitting on top of the vacant desk across the bullpen from Gibbs, and she has Ari’s dark hair and Ari’s dark eyes and an expression of determination that is Ari’s as well. Tony is standing in the walkway near Kate’s desk and when she walks up to him, he leans over and whispers in her ear. “Ziva David,” he explains. “Mossad. She’s Ari’s handler.”

Ari’s handler? What the hell is Ari’s handler doing in this office?

Gibbs looks up as Kate comes around to her desk, refusing to hide with Tony. She is not afraid of this woman, this Ziva; she will not be cowed by some stranger.

“Caitlin Todd?” Ziva asks, clearly in confirmation only, because she immediately continues speaking. “My name is Ziva David; I am a control officer with Mossad. I am here to speak with you about your recent experience with Ari Haswari.”

“I have nothing to say to you,” Kate replies. “Anything you want to know about my experience you can read in my official report.” She sits down and opens her email, turning her back to Ziva David as well as she can considering the angle at which her computer sits. “Good morning, Gibbs.”

“Kate,” Gibbs greets her in return, and she hears amusement in his voice.

Kate looks up at Tony. “Are you gonna stand over me all day,” she asks him sharply, “or are you gonna go sit down and get something done?”

Tony goes to his desk immediately, watching her nervously across the bullpen. He sees something in her, she thinks, that has him worried. Gibbs is watching her warily as well. He’s the one she’s worried about. He’s the one she doesn’t want with his nose in the wind.

She knows, intellectually, that there’s no way for her to smell like Ari Haswari. After all, it’s not like she wore his jacket. But she doesn’t want Gibbs smelling anything untoward coming from her; she has to keep this under control. She has to keep herself under control. And it’s a good thing she’s focusing on that, because if she hadn’t been, the next thing out of Ziva David’s mouth would have blindsided her and she’d have been completely exposed.

“Have you seen Ari Haswari recently?”

She manages not to fall out of her chair, though she’s certain that the sudden stiffness in her shoulders speaks for her. She just hopes she can control what that stiffness says. “No,” she lies. “And if I did, I’d shoot the bastard right between the eyes.”

“Mossad would prefer you did not do that, as he is a valuable asset,” Ziva says slowly, studying her.

Kate turns finally and stares right into Ziva’s face. The trick of staring someone down, Gibbs has taught her, is to focus not on their eyes but on the bridge of their nose, and that is what Kate does now. Staring at Ziva’s perky little nose gives her something to focus her anger on. “What do you want from me?”

“Ari has gone off the grid,” Ziva finally confesses. “We do not know where he is. He has not reported in for several days.”

“And he’s here,” Kate says flatly. “In Washington.”

“We believe that to be the case,” Ziva admits.

Kate stares at Ziva’s nose some more. “So what does that have to do with me?”

Ziva stares back. “Have you seen him?”

“I just told you no,” Kate replies. Then, tired of playing games, she takes the offensive. She stands up and approaches Ziva. “Are you accusing me of something, Miss David?”

She feels Gibbs and Tony both step up as well, flanking her, and they all study Ziva, who does not speak. Finally, Gibbs does. “Well? I believe Special Agent Todd asked you a question.”

Ziva is a dangerous person. It is obvious in the lines of her body, in the way she stands, constantly wary, and in the way she holds her hands, loose and close to her hips, as though always prepared to reach for a weapon. But she is currently outnumbered, and has foolishly allowed herself to be pinned into a very small area in an unfamiliar place. In hostile territory. Kate sees the moment that her mistake registers on her face. “No,” Ziva finally says. “I am accusing you of nothing. I am merely seeking any available information about the whereabouts of an extremely valuable asset. I apologize if I gave any other impression.”

“She hasn’t seen him,” Tony says, and his voice is flat and cold. “Neither have I.”

“Neither have I,” Gibbs adds. “Looks like you’re barking up the wrong tree here.”

“So it would seem.” Ziva picks up her duffle bag and steps gingerly to the side, moving toward the elevator. “I will see myself out.”

“You do that,” Gibbs replies. They watch her go.

Kate turns to Gibbs, opens her mouth to speak, and is stopped by his upraised hand. “Stay here,” he says. He puts one finger to his lips, demanding her silence. Then he turns and heads for the back elevator.

He is gone for about three minutes, during which time Kate and Tony stare at one another uneasily, both silent. When he returns, he’s carrying a small scanner. He steps toward that empty desk and it beeps once; he moves it around the desk until he locates what he’s looking for.

Gibbs picks up the pencil cup and turns it over. Several pens fall out onto the desk, a few pencil shavings, and a piece of plastic about the size of a hearing aid battery. He holds it up between two fingers, grinning slightly, and then puts it back down, whacking it hard with the empty pencil cup. It shatters under the force of the blow, and Tony winces. “That had to be feedback from hell.”

“I hope so,” Kate says fiercely. “Are there any more?”

Gibbs consults the scanner and finds three more, one on Tony’s desk under the base of his monitor, one under the lamp on his own desk, and one physically attached to Kate’s phone. Shaking his head after the last one is disposed of, he puts the scanner on a shelf. “From now on, whoever gets here first in the morning runs the scanner,” he says firmly. “Until we get this sorted out.”

Then he turns to Kate, one eyebrow raised, and she doesn’t even pause to worry about the potential ramifications. “He came to my apartment last night,” she confesses. “He was there when I got home.”

“Why didn’t you call me?” Gibbs demands, as she knew he would.

Kate shrugs. “It didn’t seem like something I needed to get you worked up over in the middle of the night. He was only there about fifteen minutes, and then he left again. I figured I’d tell you this morning, but then she was here, and I didn’t get a chance.”

“He came to your apartment in the middle of the night?” Tony squeaks.

Kate shrugs. “I didn’t get out of class until late. When I got home, he was there.”

“What did he want?” Gibbs demands.

Kate swallows hard and feels the flush rise, unbidden and unwanted, in her cheeks. “He said he wanted to see me,” she confesses, her voice low.

There is a very long silence after that which is broken by the ringing of Gibbs’s phone. As they gear up to head out to a crime scene, he grips her arm in his hand and gives her a deadly look. “Don’t think this is over,” he says, his voice low and dangerous. “The first chance we get, you and I are going to have a very long conversation.”

Kate swallows hard and wonders if she’s going to be fired over this.

\---

The case – a double murder involving a Navy wife and her nine-year-old daughter – keeps them busy over the weekend and unable to have that long conversation. Monday morning around six, Kate finally gets tired of wearing the same clothes and, while Gibbs is having a nap downstairs in the morgue, she asks Tony to cover for her. “I’m going home to take a shower and change,” she says. “I’ll be back in an hour and a half.”

“Is that a good idea?” Tony asks. “What if he’s at your place?”

No need to ask who _he_ is. The look on Tony’s face is explanation enough. “Then he can get the hell out while I take a shower and change clothes,” Kate replies sharply. “I’ll be back in an hour and a half.”

“It’s your neck,” Tony replies, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes.

Kate grumbles to herself all the way home, but pauses in the entryway in the act of hanging up her jacket. Something is not right. She pulls her gun and moves forward slowly, silently, checking the entire space – even the closets. There is no one there; none of her things are out of place. And yet.

Something is not right.

She stands in the middle of her living room and looks around, her eyes taking in everything. What is it? What is she missing? Then her eyes fall back on her coat rack, and she knows.

Ari left his jacket. Now it is gone.

She grabs a backpack out of the closet in the spare bedroom and packs it full to bursting with as many clothes as she can fit in it. She digs through her jewelry box, removing all the most expensive pieces and the two necklaces she inherited from her grandmother, and tucks these into a pair of socks. She sweeps all of her makeup carelessly into a travel bag, tucking the big bottle of CK One in with it. This is then squeezed into the outside pouch of the backpack. A drawstring bag from the floor of her closet will hold four pairs of shoes; she chooses three that will go with just about anything and one pair of running shoes. Toiletries come last: toothbrush, toothpaste, shampoo, conditioner and body wash all get jammed into the backpack as well as they will go.

It’s hard to zip the bag, but she gets it well enough that nothing will fall out. Then she checks the clock. She’s been inside her apartment for fifteen minutes. It’s time to get out.

She pauses on her way out the door, wondering if she should leave a message of some kind. She may be overreacting – it may simply be that Ari came back for his jacket. But she doubts it; she thinks he left the jacket to underscore his statement that they would meet again. She thinks someone – Ziva David, perhaps – has been in her apartment and retrieved that jacket.

Gibbs trained her gut. She trusts it. And her gut tells her there’s more going on here than meets the eye.

She looks around the room. If Ari comes, where will he think to look for a message from her? An idea begins to form in her head. It takes another twenty minutes to manage it, but once it’s done, she’s fairly proud of it. It’s sneaky enough, and contains enough careful references, that even if her non-Ari intruder returns and catches on, she does not think they will be able to follow it all the way to the end.

At least, she hopes not.

She grabs her things and leaves, locking the door behind her, and thinks that this may possibly be the stupidest thing she has ever done. Then, squaring her shoulders, she heads back down to her car.

Under the guise of checking a low tire, Kate carefully examines the undercarriage of her car for explosives. There are none that she can see, so she tosses her things into the back seat and climbs in behind the wheel. She pretends to turn the key, pretends frustration, and pops the hood. She checks for explosives again, fiddles with the distributor cap, whacks the battery, and drops the hood. Then, gritting her teeth in anticipation, she turns the key. The engine starts up, the car does not explode in a big fiery ball visible from space, and she is back at the office again in twenty minutes.

Gibbs is at his desk when she returns, and she forestalls his angry demand for information by providing it. “Someone’s been at my apartment,” she says, tossing her things behind her desk.

“How do you know?” he asks immediately.

“Because Ari left his jacket when he was there the other day,” she says, “and it’s gone now. But I don’t think he took it.”

“Why not?”

“Because if he’d been there, he’d have left a note or something to let me know,” Kate explains. When he looks skeptical, she sighs explosively and snaps, “My gut, Gibbs!”

He can’t argue with that. He doesn’t try. Instead, he nods. “We’ll go over later with the scanner and see if anything’s been left.”

She nods once, then grabs her backpack and heads for the elevator. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“Where are you going?” Tony asks curiously.

“To take a shower,” she replies.

“Thought you were gonna do that at home,” he says, perplexed.

She stares at him like he’s stupid. “And give somebody a chance to come in and sneak up on me while I’m washing my hair?” She shakes her head and vanishes into the elevator, heading downstairs to the gym.

When she steps out of the shower eight minutes later, wrapped in a towel, Gibbs is sitting on a bench nearby. She gives a small shriek of surprise, then glares at him through the strands of her wet hair. “You do realize this is the _women’s_ locker room?”

He shrugs. “Figured this was as good a time as any for us to have that little talk.”

She sighs, grabs her duffel, and steps into a dry shower stall, pulling the curtain shut. “And then you wonder why we always get stuck going to so many sexual harassment seminars.”

“Why didn’t you call me to tell me he was at your house?”

“I told you why. There was nothing you could have done about it, and it would only have upset you.” She dries herself off quickly, then begins to root through her bag for appropriate clothing.

“Upset me?” he repeats. “Upset me? Am I a cardiac patient or something that you have to try and keep my blood pressure down?”

“No,” she replies, pulling the curtain back just far enough to glare at him before ducking back behind it, “but you _are_ prone to overreacting, just a little. If I’d called you Thursday night and said ‘Hey, Gibbs, guess who just left my house,’ you’d have completely flipped and I wouldn’t have gotten any sleep.”

She pushes the curtain back and steps out, dressed in khaki pants and a blue button-down top, then goes to sit beside him and pull her socks and shoes on. “Look, Gibbs, you’ve been training me for a year. I’m learning how to distinguish between dangerous situations and not-dangerous situations. And when he was there, I wasn’t in any danger.” She stands up and carries her makeup kit over to the mirrors, retrieving her hairbrush and beginning to work the snarls out. “If he’d wanted to kill me, he’d have done it that day at the farm.”

“Then what does he want from you?” Gibbs asks.

“I’m not sure,” Kate confesses. “But I think it has something to do with his handler being here Friday. He’s a spy, and a damn good one. He wouldn’t go off the grid without a reason.”

“He’s also a double agent,” Gibbs points out. “Who’s to say he hasn’t gone over?”

Kate shakes her head. “I don’t think he has.”

“But you don’t have any way of knowing that for sure.” Gibbs studies her carefully. “You really believe this guy’s on the up and up. Kind eyes again?”

“I really do,” she confirms. “But it’s not his eyes. It’s… I don’t know if I can put my finger on it. Just…” She pauses in the act of applying foundation and turns to face him. “My gut is telling me there’s more to this than meets the eye. And I think the best thing we can do is keep an open mind and open eyes until we figure out what it has to do with us.”

“All right,” Gibbs says. “I can do that. For now. But Kate, you don’t go anywhere by yourself until this is over. Not even outside for air. Got me? If you’re not inside this building, you’re with me or Tony.”

Kate nods. “I can deal with that,” she says. She turns back to the mirror. “He may get in contact with me. I left him a note.”

“You did what?”

“Calm down. I didn’t leave it out where just anyone could find it. But he obviously wants something from me, and he’s gotta be able to get in touch with me to get it. I left him my cell phone number.”

“Where?”

She smiles as she applies eyeliner. “Someplace cool.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He told her they would meet again soon; she wasn't sure what he meant by that until he turned her life upside down.

It has been five days since the first time he picked the lock on Caitlin’s apartment door and let himself inside. Nothing about the apartment is different, and yet somehow everything is different. Ari stands in the entryway with his back to the door and considers the space. There is something about the air in here which is wrong.

His jacket is missing from the coat rack; this is the first thing that he notices. He wonders if she hung it up somewhere; then he wonders, with a grin, if she is wearing it. He strolls further in, taking everything in with all five senses, and realizes what is wrong. The apartment feels stale, as though no one has been inside it in some time.

Where is she?

He wanders into the kitchen first, studying the space. There are a few clean dishes in the draining board by the sink, but the sink itself is bone dry, as is the dishrag hanging over the faucet. The dishes, too, are dry. He wonders when the last time was that she ate here. He turns to the refrigerator, thinking to check the state of the milk in the carton – if it is spoiled, he will know that it has been quite some time. That is when the note catches his eye.

It is hanging there, stuck behind a magnet shaped like a butterfly, and its message is quite simple.

 _Hello, lover_ , it reads. _Would you like to play a game?_

He stares at it for a few moments. That is definitely her handwriting, but he has been watching her for some time and is fairly certain that she has no lover. Who could this note be addressed to?

And then he realizes – it’s addressed to him.

Caitlin did not take his jacket off the coat rack; someone else did. Someone who would know that jacket was his.

Ziva.

Ziva has been in this apartment; Ziva has been in touch with Caitlin. And Ziva, who never learned when a light touch was best, has gotten Kate’s wind up.

He goes back to this intriguing note. _You’re probably hungry after your long day at work_ , it continues. _Maybe you should have something to eat before we begin._

It is signed simply, _C_.

He opens the refrigerator and peers inside. Sitting prominently at the very front of the cold space is the bucket of chicken he brought. He pulls it out and opens it. At the bottom of the bucket, there is another note.

 _You’ve caught on, then_ , it reads. _Good boy. Remember what we talked about the last time you were here? I bet you do. See what you can sniff out._

He puts the chicken back in the refrigerator and the note in his pocket, then steps out into the living room, looking around and thinking of what they discussed. Outside of his reasons for being in her apartment, the only real topic he can remember them discussing is his religion, or lack thereof.

Religion. He labeled himself agnostic, but he knows that she is Catholic. He looks around carefully, studying the room, and his eyes fall on the statue of the Virgin Mary which sits on one of her bookshelves. Beside it, several candles are arranged in a visually pleasing display. One of them is in a smoky glass chimney.

He takes the candle down, smelling its vanilla scent, and shakes it out of the chimney. Beneath it, another note lies. _You’re getting warmer_ , it reads, and he can almost hear the humor in her voice as she sends him on this little scavenger hunt. _Now I have another question for you. Do you remember what I was wearing the day we went on that trip out to the countryside?_

Does he remember? How can he forget? The sight of her sitting there in the sunlight, her head proudly raised to receive the bullet Marta threatened her with, is forever burned into his mind. He replaces the candle, sticks the note in his pocket with the first one, and goes into her bedroom.

The white skirt has no pockets, but the white jacket does, and inside one of the pockets is another note. _You’re really good at this_ , her handwriting praises him, and he would chuckle if he wasn’t feeling so very antsy about getting her message and getting the hell out of there. He understands why she went to such great lengths to hide it, but now is one time that he really wishes things could be more straightforward. _The last time you took me out_ , the note says, _You dropped me off somewhere. Do you remember where that was? I hope you do._

He considers. He dropped her off at a random location after making certain they weren’t being followed, so the place was not by design. Clearly, though, it was somewhere specific. He closes his eyes and visualizes her leaning over to look into the window at him. In his mind’s eye, he examines the building behind her, and he remembers the man who walked out the door with a cup of coffee in his hand. A coffee shop then.

He goes back into the kitchen. He checks the cupboards first, finds the can of French Roast, and opens it. It is nearly empty, and there is no note inside. The replacement can, standing behind it, has not yet been opened. He turns to the coffee pot and opens it. There, where the filter should be, is another note. 

_The first time we met_ , this note reads, _we didn’t get along very well. In fact, we said some fairly nasty things to one another. I distinctly remember glaring very, very hard at you as you shut the door. Do you remember that? If looks could kill, you’d be six feet under right now. I’m glad looks can’t kill._

That is his hint? What is that supposed to reference? He stares at the note for a moment, then suddenly realizes. When he shut the door on her, when she’d given him such a poisonous look, he’d been closing her into the body cooler.

He opens the refrigerator again, slides the drawers open. In the crisper, on top of the celery, is another note. _Not here_. In the meat drawer, on top of her cold cuts, is another one just like it. 

In the butter tray is another note. _Closer and closer_ , it says. _Remember that day out in the country? I asked you a pretty serious question, but you wanted to deal with something trivial before we talked about the serious things_.

He closes the refrigerator and thinks back.

She’d wanted to know what he wanted with her, why he had gone to the trouble of kidnapping her. She’d been standing there, so defiant, daring him while bleeding from her mouth where Bassam hit her. And he had said…

“First some ice for your lip,” he whispers to himself, and jerks the freezer door open.

In the bottom of the ice tray he finds a final note. This one has a nine-digit number written on it, and one final message. _I think they’re watching my place. Get out fast. Be careful._

He checks his watch. He has been inside her apartment for fully fifteen minutes. That is long enough for whoever is undoubtedly watching to have alerted Ziva that he is here. He leaves quickly, locking the door behind him, and takes the elevator up two floors. He crosses the building to the other side and takes the fire escape down to the next landing, where he easily jumps across the narrow alley to the fire escape of the building next door. He climbs up to the roof of that building, crosses to the next, and makes his way in that manner to the far end of the block. There he climbs back down to the ground and catches the city bus.

He gets off the bus at the National Mall and slips through tourist groups, crossing the Mall and catching another bus on the other side. This one takes him to the airport, where he catches yet another bus that takes him to a Metrorail station. He rides the Metrorail for a full two hours, back and forth across the city, until he is fairly certain that he is either not being followed or has shaken any tail he might have had. Then he walks into the Washington Plaza Hotel, presents French identification papers and a MasterCard with a matching name to the concierge, and rents a hotel room.

He goes upstairs, fills the ice bucket, opens a can of soda from the mini bar, and fills a glass with ice and Coca-Cola. He leaves these on the table next to the bed. He orders a pornographic movie from the pay-per-view catalog, switches it on, and pulls the comforter off the bed, leaving it on the floor. He rolls around on the clean white sheets for a moment, sets the pillows up and leans back against them to indent their crisp flatness, and then he stands. He studies the room for a moment, then goes into the bathroom, pulls the folded end off the toilet paper roll, and flushes it, leaving the toilet seat up. He runs the shower for a moment, getting the stall and the tiny complimentary bar of soap very wet. He leaves a damp towel on the floor. Then he slips out of the room, leaving his room key on the table. His preparations took about ten minutes.

He leaves the floor by an elevator shaft on the other side of the building from his room, because there was a large group of people waiting for it. He goes out through the parking garage, considers stealing a car, and decides against it when he finds a motorcycle. It’s a Ducati Desmosedici RR, a limited edition bike. Only fifteen hundred of this model were manufactured. It is brand new, shiny and red, and it is calling his name.

A few minutes later, it is purring between his thighs as he puts the helmet, which the owner so generously left on the handlebar, onto his head. He grins behind the reflective faceplate, revs the engine, and peels out.

Thirty minutes later, he walks into a drugstore on the other side of the city and makes several purchases in cash. Then he crosses the state line into Virginia and heads toward Manassas. He stops before he gets there at a little motel that has seen better days, and takes a room. He pays in cash again, and the fat man behind the desk barely gives him a second glance.

He is in that room for a couple of hours, and when he comes out, he looks nothing like he did when he went in. His hair and beard are now quite blond thanks to Clairol, and his skin is the healthy tan of someone who spends a lot of time at the beach, thanks to Maybelline. He gets on the bike and makes his way to the nearest Wal-Mart store, where he purchases clothing, toiletries, and a bag to carry them in. He buys all of these things on the same MasterCard with which he rented the room at the Washington Plaza – a room which he is certain has, by now, been thoroughly searched. Then he goes to the ATM which stands beside the ice machine. 

As other shoppers pass by, not paying any attention to him, he goes through each of the credit cards in his wallet systematically, withdrawing the largest amount of cash he can from each one. Then he leaves the store and crosses the parking lot, hopping onto the motorcycle again and crossing the street to a gas station, where he changes his clothing. He studies his reflection in the mirror for a moment, satisfied that he no longer looks like himself, and he steps out of the bathroom to find a police car parked behind the motorcycle. The officer is examining the bike’s plates.

Damn.

The officer looks up at him. “This your bike?” 

“No, Officer,” he replies truthfully.

“You know who came on this bike?”

“A tall man, built similarly to myself,” he replies, “with dark hair and brown skin. He wore leather pants and a black shirt.”

“You see which way he went?”

Ari shakes his head. “I am afraid not; he was here when I went into the restroom.”

The cop nods. “Mind staying here for a second? I need to ask you a few more questions.”

“Of course not, Officer,” Ari replies. He is nothing if not friendly and helpful. The officer goes inside the station. Ari vanishes as though he had never been there.

Three minutes later, he is inside the cab of an eighteen wheeler, having hitched a ride with a large, smelly fellow whose belt buckle reads “Jethro”. Just his luck, he thinks sourly to himself, but he keeps his mouth shut.

It is nearly nine o’clock in the evening before he finally hops out of the truck’s cab, thanks Jethro for the ride, and shrugs into his backpack. He makes his way through the darkened streets of Washington to a house he has never visited before, hoping that the resident will be at home.

He is out of luck; Gibbs’s house is dark and empty. Well, he thinks, there’s nothing else for it.

He lifts the receiver of the telephone in Gibbs’s kitchen and dials the nine-digit number that was on the paper in Caitlin’s ice tray.

\---

Ari will not come in to NCIS headquarters, no matter how hard Kate tries to convince him. “It is the first place they will think to look for me, Caitlin,” he tells her. “Ziva has already been there; you said so yourself.”

He has a point, Kate thinks sourly. “Fine,” she says, her eyes on Gibbs. “Where do you want to meet up?”

“I want you to choose a place,” he says. “Somewhere outside the city that people would not expect you to be. I will call you back.” He hangs up, and so does she, and she looks at Gibbs.

“He wants me to come up with a meeting place; somewhere people wouldn’t expect me to be.”

“Makes sense. He’ll call you back to find out where?”

She nods.

“Good.” Gibbs begins to outline a plan. By the time he is done, Kate’s eyebrows are up near her hairline.

“You’re really good at this,” she comments.

He snorts. “I did this for a living in Europe six years ago,” he says. “I ought to be good at it.” He studies her carefully. “Kate… I’m trusting you on this.”

“I know,” she says softly. “I appreciate it.”

“Do not screw this up,” he warns her. “I’ve never lost anybody on an undercover op, and I don’t intend to start with you.”

She smiles. “I’ll be careful.”

“You’d better. Come on; let’s get you equipped.”

Abby has a closet full of interesting items. Among them are GPS trackers, video and audio surveillance equipment, and emergency transmitters, all small enough to be inserted into pieces of jewelry, the hems of clothing, hair clips and the like – or to be implanted subdermally. 

Kate, sitting on an autopsy table, watches nervously as Abby lays the GPS tracker on the sterile cloth and Ducky lays out his tools. “Are you sure this is safe?”

“A hundred percent,” Abby replies. “It’s just like a Norplant. Trust me.”

“I do trust you,” Kate replies. “I’m just a little nervous about all this.”

Ducky carefully wipes a small spot on her right arm with a topical anesthetic, then with an alcohol swab. “You don’t have to watch,” he points out.

“I know,” Kate replies, and proceeds to watch as he makes a tiny incision in her arm and inserts the tracking device. It’s enclosed in a plastic cylinder about an inch long and just a few millimeters in diameter, and although she can feel it sliding into her arm, it doesn’t hurt at all. Once it’s seated, Ducky dabs the incision with some Neosporin and covers it with a Band-Aid.

Abby pats Kate’s left arm. “There,” she says. “Now we don’t have to worry about losing you.”

Kate makes a face. “Thanks. It’s nice to know you’ll be able to retrieve my bullet-riddled corpse.”

Abby points a finger at her, an uncharacteristically serious expression on her face. “Do not talk like that!”

Kate flushes slightly. “Sorry, Abbs.”

Abby continues to glare until Ducky pats her shoulder. “Why don’t you go and get the other equipment?” he suggests, and Abby goes.

Kate sighs. “I don’t think I’m cut out for this spy stuff.”

The good doctor merely chuckles as he cleans up the area. “I think you’ll do fine, once you get over your nerves.”

“If I can manage that before the craziness starts.”

“You’ll find,” he tells her, “that once the craziness starts, you won’t have time for nerves.” He pats her on the shoulder just like he did Abby and launches into a story about something he did in France once. Kate half-listens, worrying about the upcoming mission.

She is going out alone. 

Oh, she won’t be entirely alone; Gibbs will stay close to her, following her via the GPS tracker now imbedded in her arm. Tony will be in MTAC, also following her progress. But still, she will to a certain extent be alone. Being alone with Ari Haswari makes Kate Todd very, very nervous.

It’s not as if she doesn’t recognize that he’s an extremely desirable example of the male of the species. It’s not as though she can pretend she’s never been into bad boys, and he’s definitely the ultimate bad boy. It’s not like she can say the thought of him, especially in _that_ way, doesn’t give her a low down, dirty tickle. 

Of course, that’s part of the problem. If he knew she’d thought about him like that, if he knew she’d fantasized about him more than once, in the darkness of her empty bed, it would give him a certain power over her that she isn’t sure she wants him to have. There’s a part of Kate that can’t help but feel used every time a relationship goes south, every time a man turns out to have just been in it for the sex. She doesn’t think she could take it from this man. It might just do something irreparable to her soul.

She doesn’t want to think about that right now. She _needs_ to not think about that. She very badly needs to be focused on this mission, and not about the betrayal of her body.

She needs to focus on what Abby is saying about the transmitters she’s being equipped with.

She listens carefully as Abby explains what she has. The necklace Abby is putting around her neck has audio and visual transmitters in the pendant, as do the glasses Kate puts on her own face. The glasses are her main link back to both Gibbs and MTAC. If for some reason she should be parted from them, the necklace will serve as backup. If for some reason she should be parted from both the glasses and the necklace, here is a small pouch of tiny emergency transmitters. She tucks this into her bra.

“If you absolutely have to,” Abby says, “the transmitters are safe to swallow. But you shouldn’t need to, because of the implant.”

Kate nods. “Thanks, Abbs,” she says softly.

Abby hugs her tight. “Be careful,” she admonishes in a fierce whisper. Then she vanishes out the door.

Ducky pats Kate on the arm again, repeats Abby’s admonishment, and watches as she heads back upstairs.

All too soon, it is time to leave, and Kate climbs behind the wheel of a blue government sedan while Gibbs climbs behind the wheel of another. They both activate the in-car computers, hook up to MTAC, and are then hooked up to one another. Once the three-way connection is made, they pull out of the motor pool lot and onto the street.

They are, of course, immediately followed. She doesn’t need Gibbs to point out the black Mini that pulls out behind them, or the yellow Mustang behind it. They are a little on the obvious side. She ignores them, searching instead for something that’s not obvious. Where is the car that’s too easy to overlook? Where is the motorcycle that slides too easily in and out of traffic?

“There,” Gibbs says. “White Celica, about half a block back.”

Kate locates the vehicle in her rearview mirror and nods once. “Got it,” she confirms. 

“Turn left up here.”

She does so, lets him direct her even though she knows perfectly well how to shake a tail, and within five blocks, they have lost all three of their pursuers. They travel through the city randomly for a quarter of an hour, just to make certain that they are not picked up again, and when they think they have been successful, they leave the city, heading north toward Baltimore.

Her cell phone rings as she’s merging off the Beltway and onto I-95. “Todd,” she announces.

“Which direction?”

“North,” she says. “Toward Baltimore.”

“I will be in touch.” He hangs up again. 

She glances at the computer screen, where she can see Tony’s face. “Catch that?”

“Got it,” Gibbs replies.

“So did I,” Tony answers.

“Good.” Kate flexes her fingers on the steering wheel. “Next time I complain about how boring my life is, someone slap me.” Tony laughs, and Kate is able to smile at the sound. 

They are sitting in a diner on the southeast edge of Baltimore when her phone rings again. “I have left a package for you at the front desk of the Radisson,” he informs her. “You will require a password in order to collect it. Do you recall playing a game with me at the farmhouse?”

“I do,” she replies.

“The password is the name of the person who watched us play,” he replied, “followed by the surname of the person who was threatened in order to gain your cooperation, followed by the name of the person who called your cell phone when you were in the car, followed by the name of the person who drove the car you were riding in.”

The woman’s name was Marta; the person she threatened was Tony. Gibbs called her cell phone; the driver of the car was Bassam. These are things she will never forget. “I’ll go now,” she replies. He hangs up, and so does she.


	3. Company Man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He told her they would meet again soon; she wasn't sure what he meant by that until he turned her life upside down.

The package turns out to contain two things: a prepaid cell phone and a valet parking tag. The tag goes to an unassuming white four-door Hyundai, and she transfers to it without a second thought, leaving the government sedan safely in the Radisson’s parking garage. She takes her things, slipping an earwig into her ear so that she can stay in real-time contact, and pulls out of the parking garage, randomly turning right and heading through town. The new cell phone chirps and she answers it quickly. “Hello.”

“Why, hello, Caitlin. How lovely to hear your voice.”

She snorts. “Can the crap, Ari. Where am I going?”

“Are you completely alone?”

“Of course not,” she replies. “Gibbs is following me.”

He sighs softly. “Very well,” he says. “I want you to turn left on North Calvert Street, then left again on West Madison. When you get to Mcculloh Street, veer to the right and follow it all the way to the north end of Druid Hill Park. Turn left on Forty-First Street and park in the large parking lot at the park. I will come to you there.” He hangs up again, and Kate relays the message to Gibbs even as she follows directions.

Twenty minutes later, Kate is sitting on a bench near the parking lot, her backpack on her back. She studies her running shoes, glad she had the foresight recently to buy a new pair, and wonders what is taking Ari so long. Finally her phone chirps, and she flips it open. “Yeah.”

“Stand up, turn to your left, and walk directly into the trees.”

She does so, muttering to Gibbs the whole way. She is halfway through the thick patch of woods when a hand that smells of gunpowder clamps over her mouth. “Do not scream,” Ari’s voice whispers.

She snatches herself away, turning to face him with murder in her eyes. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

He studies her. “We need to go.”

“Come on, then.”

“Not with Gibbs. And take those glasses off; they don’t suit your face at all.” He starts away.

“Ari!”

He turns to face her, and for the first time in their acquaintance, there is no mockery, no teasing, nothing in his face except deadly seriousness. “Do you want the information that I have or not?” he demands. “If you do, you will come with me. If you do not, then go back to Gibbs, and I will leave your life as though I had never been in it. The choice is yours.”

She doesn’t even pause to think about it. She shifts her backpack on her shoulders and follows him through the woods. They take a walking trail through the trees and when they come out on the other side, he leads her to a motorcycle like the one he was riding the day she was kidnapped by his cohorts. This one is blue, a bit larger than the first, and has two cargo carriers on either side of the pillion seat.

He tosses a leg over the bike carelessly and she climbs on behind him, a little nervous. “Ari,” she murmurs, “don’t get me killed on this thing.”

“Do not worry, Caitlin,” he tells her, handing her a helmet and patting her leg. “Just lean with me and if you become frightened, close your eyes.”

He loses Gibbs within the first fifteen minutes of the drive; she knows when it happens by the curses that erupt through her earwig. Shortly thereafter, she only gets static through the device, because they have gotten too far from the transmitter. She sighs softly and hangs on tighter as he merges onto the expressway and begins weaving through traffic.

To keep her mind off the very suicidal thing she is doing, she considers his changed look. She knows it was necessary, but it’s almost comical to look at Ari Haswari and see a blonde, tanned beach bum dressed in khaki cargo pants and a slightly-too-tight tee shirt. He looks, she thinks in amusement, like Abercrombie and Fitch threw up all over him. Then he does something crazy with the bike and she gives a soft scream, clenching her eyes closed, and he laughs, and she feels the vibrations of it through his body.

It is dark before they get to New York, but that doesn’t stop him from taking them into the city via the Staten Island Expressway. He drives a little more calmly in the city; it’s sort of required, since there are people everywhere and the traffic is just as thick as it always seems to be in the movies. Kate is familiar with New York, though, and she realizes about halfway there that they are on a direct course to Union Station.

When he finally parks the bike in the short-term parking lot, she grabs his arm as he is dismounting. “Why are we here?” she demands.

“We are here to retrieve certain pieces of information which I wish your agency to have,” he replies, and she follows him inside. He moves directly to a bank of lockers and opens one with a key, pulling out a duffel bag and handing it to her. “Come,” he says. “There is somewhere else we need to be.”

He shows her how to open the cargo carrier and she stuffs the duffel bag into it, then fits her own bag in on top of it. “Where are we going now?” she asks.

“Somewhere safe,” he replies. “So that I can tell you everything.”

 

 

The third-floor Harlem walkup he takes her to is a Hamas safehouse, though he does not tell her that. It’s a place that he’s never told Ziva about; the only safehouse she knows of in New York is in Staten Island. And with any luck, she’s still looking for him in D.C., since he tossed his credit cards in different places around the city.

Caitlin is nervous, he can tell, but so is he, and he doesn’t really have it in him right now to pander to her fears. He leads her up to the apartment, lets her inside, and pauses when he is greeted from the end of the hallway by a Yemeni man who lives in the building.

“Abdullah!” he greets the other man in Arabic. “Peace be upon your house! It has been a very long time since I have seen you!”

“And peace upon yours as well, Hussein,” Abdullah responds. “You have not been here in some time.”

“Ah, unfortunately I have been required at home on family business,” Ari tells him. “My father has been ill.”

“I am terribly sorry to hear that,” Abdullah says. “But it seems Allah has blessed him with a dutiful son.”

Ari smiles self-deprecatingly. “I do what I can.”

Then Abdullah’s grin turns sly. “I see that you have brought a lovely young woman home with you today,” he says. “Surely she is not your new wife.”

Ari laughs. “Not yet,” he says conspiratorially. “But perhaps someday.” He shakes his head. “These brash American women are fascinating to me, I must confess. I fear in this I have caused my father some shame. But she is a strong, intelligent, willful woman who will make me a very exciting wife, if only I can convince her to convert.”

Abdullah laughs as well. “I wish you joy and good health, my very good friend,” he says. “And good luck with your headstrong American.”

They part as friends, and Ari slips into the apartment, shutting and locking the door behind him. Then he turns to Caitlin, who is sitting on the sofa under the window. She is holding the scanner in her hands that says there are no listening devices in the apartment, and she is looking at the pendant on her necklace with a certain amount of perplexity.

“Problem?”

She looks up at him. “I thought this would work no matter where I was,” she confesses. “But I guess we’re too far away.”

He grins slightly. “Did you not think that I would take into account that you would be wired for sound?

She sighs. “Can we please get to the point of all this?”

Their bags are piled by the door; he grabs the duffel he picked up in Union Station and brings it to her, sitting down on the sofa beside her. “This is a problem,” he says softly, “that I cannot handle on my own. I am badly in need of help, and as I am sure you have guessed, it is not easy for me to admit such a thing. I am quite accustomed to taking care of problems by myself.”

He opens the bag and pulls out several envelopes. When he opens the first one and gives her the contents, she does not know what she is looking at. “Who are these people?”

“This man is Abdul al-Rami,” he says, pointing to the turban-clad man on the right in the photograph. “He is an operative of Hamas who, the last time I spoke with him, was working in Germany. This man,” he continues, pointing at the suit-clad man on the left in the picture, “is Director Shemuel David, of Mossad.”

Kate stares at the picture. “The director of Mossad meeting with a Hamas operative?”

He takes the top picture and she gasps at the next, and then the next. The series of incriminating photographs clearly show David accepting a large sum of money from al-Rami, and providing him in return with a flat manila envelope. “In that envelope,” Ari explains, “I believe to be the names of a number of Mossad double agents, myself included.”

Her head jerks up. “Your cover’s blown?”

“Mine and a number of others,” he replies. “The first two who came for me I was able to kill easily. The third was not so easy, and before he died, he revealed to me that he had been told about my status as a double agent shortly after our meeting at the farmhouse. That, Caitlin, is why it took me three months to come to you. I have been on the run from Hamas all this time, attempting to return to safety in Israel, only to learn once I got there that there is no safety for me in Israel; there is no safety for me anywhere when my father has sold my soul to the Palestinians for sixty silver shekels.”

The irony of his statement is not lost on Kate, and she slips the photographs back into their folder with care. “I assume you have the negatives?”

“The photographs are digital,” he replies. He hands her a tiny plastic sleeve which holds a digital memory card. “Here is a copy of them. I have others.”

She pulls her shoe off and tucks the card under the insole, then pulls her shoe back on, cocking her head as something else he has said occurs to her. “Your father?”

He nods. “My father is Director David.”

“I thought your father was Benjamin Weinstein.”

He laughs softly. “No. Dr. Benjamin Weinstein does not exist; he was created on paper when the school my mother wished to enroll me in required that she provide my father’s name.” He watches, waiting for her to put the rest of the pieces together.

“Wait… your handler’s name is David. Ziva – is she your sister?”

He nods. “She is.”

“Does she know what’s going on?”

He shrugs. “I do not know. I would like to think that she does not, because she is after all my sister, and we have always been very close. She is more dangerous if she knows; if she thinks that I have simply gone off the grid for my own reasons, she is less likely to try to kill me and more likely to want to talk to me and find out what is going on.” He sets the folder of photographs aside and holds up the other two. “These two folders contain copies of correspondence between Director David and Abdul al-Rami as well as other Hamas operatives. It is… fairly incriminating.” He smirks slightly. “It would seem that Adonai is no longer sufficient God for Shemuel David.”

Kate raises her eyebrows. “He’s converting?”

“Money, Caitlin,” Ari replies, a bit impatiently. “Not Allah. My father does not care for the gods of men. He is interested only in money and power.”

“Oh.” Caitlin flushes slightly and he can’t help but smile at the sight. Then he sits back against the couch.

“The trouble I am having,” he says softly, “is that I have this information and I do not know what to do with it. I am dead either way, you see.”

She raises horrified eyes to him. “What are you talking about? We’ll get this back to NCIS and Gibbs will know what to do with it.”

He smirks slightly. “Caitlin,” he says gently, “if Mossad does not get me first, Hamas undoubtedly will. They will understand now why their mission to capture Bush and Sharon failed; they will not believe that my original mission to NCIS failed because I was entirely outdone by the band of insane marauders who works there. They will believe that I failed it deliberately. There are other missions about which you know nothing which I also had a hand in bringing down; they will put the pieces together, if they have not already, and they will understand that everything I have done was because I was working from within to bring them down. I was inside al Qaeda, Caitlin. They are people who do not take lightly to what they consider disloyalty.”

“No,” Caitlin says firmly. “We won’t let that happen.” She is completely sincere, and for a moment he is so taken by her that he almost allows himself to believe that somehow everything will work out all right.

Then he laughs softly. “You cannot prevent it,” he says, reaching out and laying a hand on hers. “It will happen.”

“No!” she insists, her voice louder now. Her eyes snap in fury, the color rises in her cheeks, and she stands. “I’m telling you, Ari, we can keep you safe! Gibbs can take care of this! You have to trust us!”

She is so sure of herself, of her mentor who can do no wrong in her eyes, in her agency and in her government. She is certain with every fiber of her being that if she can get him back to Washington and into NCIS headquarters, that everything will work out fine, and there will at the end of the day be hugs, puppies and possibly even rainbows and butterflies.

Despite everything she has seen in her work, she still believes in happy endings.

He can’t help it. The sight of her clinging so hard to her faith in the innate goodness of the world is beautiful to him, and he leans forward, pulls her to him, and presses his mouth to hers the way he has wanted to since the day he held her body against his in a morgue. His lips caress hers, and her lips part slightly, whether in surprise or invitation he cannot say.

It doesn’t matter; he has never been one to let such an opportunity pass him by. He slips his tongue between her lips, seeking out the flavors of her fear and her hope, learning the taste and the feel of her, and his hands slide up her arms as he does so. One of them grips her left shoulder, the other buries itself in the fall of her hair, and for one long moment, his world consists of nothing more than his lips on hers.

Then he hears a sound that does not belong in this apartment – the sound of someone trying to pick the lock silently from outside and not doing a very good job of it. He lunges for their things, throwing her bag at her and shouldering his own. To her credit, she moves quickly, shaking off her own shock at his actions, scooping up the duffel with the incriminating documents and following him into the next room, where he is already opening the window onto the fire escape.

A shot rings out from below and he jerks back from the window, pulling his gun out of the waistband of his pants. She draws her own weapon, but he waves her back. “I will take care of this,” he murmurs. “I do not wish you to be incriminated if it is not necessary.”

She backs behind the wall at his wave and waits, her gun still held tightly in her hands. The lock finally clicks and the door swings open, and a moment later, the gun in Ari’s hand makes a tiny sound through its silencer. There is a dull thud as the intruder falls to the floor, and Ari darts forward, dragging the body of his unfortunate victim into the apartment. He leans out the door, glancing up and down the hall, and then waves to Caitlin. “Come,” he whispers. “Quickly.”

They are almost to the end of the hall when he hears Abdullah’s voice again. “If you move, Ari, I will shoot your woman.”

Ah. He should have known better. Of course Abdullah is Hamas. He probably isn’t Yemeni, either; not that it matters at this point. Ari curses himself briefly for not checking better. He holds very still for a long moment, and then he whispers very softly, “When I move, dodge forward and fall to the floor.”

“What’s going on?” she asks. “What did he say?”

Caitlin doesn’t speak Arabic. That’s something to remember; something that, if they make it out of this alive, he is going to have to rectify. “He said if I move, he will shoot you. I wish you to make of yourself a very swiftly-moving target.”

Caitlin nods once. He likes that about her: no vapors, no shrinking in the face of danger. Just a nod. And when he turns, she explodes into movement.

Abdullah’s shot rings out, but she makes no sound, so Ari is fairly sure she’s not hit. He takes a brief second to sight along the barrel of his silencer-equipped Ruger, and a moment later, Abdullah is lying in the floor with an extra hole in the center of his forehead. Ari stuffs the gun into his waistband and grabs Caitlin’s arm, pulling her up off the floor. “Are you hit?”

“No.”

“Good. Come, quickly. We have little time. And put your gun away; do you want to have to explain why you used it?”

“Ari, I –”

“Stop arguing with me! Until we acquire an untraceable weapon for you to use, you will not have a gun in your hand. Put it away.”

She glares at him, but she puts the gun away. He leads her down the hall to the elevator. It is out of order, according to the sign on the door, but they pull the doors open anyway and they find to their luck that it has stopped between their floor and the one below. They climb onto the top of the car and shove the doors shut again, and then they start up the service ladder.

When they exit the shaft, they are on the roof, and Ari takes a moment to catch his bearings before he heads west across the roof. The gap between this building and the next is very small, and he jumps it with no problems. He turns to encourage her to follow him and finds her staring at the gap, her face white.

“Caitlin,” he hisses, but she is not looking at him; she is staring at that gap, and he suddenly realizes that she is afraid of heights. “Caitlin,” he says firmly. “Look at me.”

She looks up at him, her eyes wide, and he holds out his hands. “Throw me your bags. Both of them.”

She does so, tossing first the duffel and then her heavier backpack. He shoos her back. “I want you to get a good running start,” he says. “And do not look down. Look at me. I will tell you when to jump.”

She swallows hard, but begins to back up, her eyes attached to him. He thinks he hears a whimper of fear in the back of her throat, but she swallows it down hard when he says, “That’s far enough. Now, run to me, Caitlin.”

She takes a deep breath and bursts into motion, running at him as hard as she can. Just when she is at the edge, he says, “Jump! Now!” and she does, flying across the gap between the buildings and rolling to the side. He gives her only a moment to catch her breath before they are doing it again, crossing to the next building, and then to the next, and then to the next, until they are at the end of the block and must climb down because neither of them can jump all the way across a Harlem street. They take the fire escape down to the ground, and he checks the street signs and he leads her down the sidewalk on foot.

“I am growing very weary of having to leave vehicles behind,” he comments. “First the Honda I left at your apartment, then the Ducati which was retrieved by the police, and now another, better Honda. If this trend continues, I shall be reduced to stealing bicycles.”

Caitlin laughs softly, and Ari is pleased to see that the color has returned to her face. “I did not know that you are afraid of heights,” he comments idly.

She shrugs. “I try not to let people find out. Especially Tony. They always think it’s funny.”

He cocks his head curiously. “I do not see why.”

“Neither do I,” she confesses. “But almost everyone thinks it’s funny when they find out I’m afraid of heights. Tony would never let me hear the end of it, I’m sure.”

Ari shakes his head. “I do not believe Agent DiNozzo is someone I would want on my team,” he comments, and he is amazed at the change in her.

Her eyes narrow and her brows come together, and she stops in the middle of the sidewalk to point a dangerous finger at him. “You don’t even know Tony,” she snaps. “He’s a damn good agent and I’m proud to have him on my side. You don’t get to talk about Tony like that.”

He holds his hands up in surrender. “I apologize,” he says. “You are quite correct. I have never met the man, and I am certain that he is good at what he does.”

“You’re damn right he is,” Kate snaps, falling back into step beside him. “You can’t survive with Gibbs if you’re not good at what you do.”

Fascinating, really. She is loyal to a fault, even to those who may or may not deserve her loyalty. Agent DiNozzo drives her crazy – all the intelligence Ari has on their team indicates that he would. He is a free spirit, wild and windblown and fundamentally incapable of being serious unless actually being shot at; she is constantly wound tighter than a clock spring. But she will not allow anyone to speak negatively of him in her hearing, on pain of dismemberment.

He wonders if she will be as loyal to him.


	4. Company Man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He told her they would meet again soon; she wasn't sure what he meant by that until he turned her life upside down.

While Ari is buying her an unregistered gun in a pawnshop, Kate slips into the shop’s filthy restroom, turns on her burn phone, and calls Gibbs. She gives him a very quick rundown of everything they’ve experienced and he has one order for her.

“I’m about a mile from you, tracking you on the GPS,” he says. “Stick with him for now; if you need me to get you out of there, hit one of the transmitters.”

“Will do,” she replies and hangs up again. She turns the phone off and uses the restroom; filthy as it is, she really does have to go. Bad. When she comes out, Ari gives her the new gun. It’s a nine millimeter Baby Eagle with a high-quality silencer. She slips it into the small of her back and waits until they are outside, unobserved in an alley, to unload her service weapon and jam it into the bottom of her backpack.

“Now what?” she asks him, and he considers her.

“Where is Gibbs?” he asks.

She shrugs. “Not far.”

He nods. “I expected as much. Are you tracked?”

“Of course I am,” she replies. “You didn’t think they were going to just send me out here with you absolutely alone, did you?”

He laughs. “Of course not. Special Agent Gibbs values you far too highly for that. You are his special protégé, are you not? His own personal savant, stolen from under the very nose of the President himself.”

Kate blushes slightly. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

“Then you underestimate your own worth,” Ari says, grinning. “Come.”

The basement apartment he takes her to now is, he tells her, hopefully more secure than the last one. “As far as I am aware,” he confesses, “no one besides myself knows about it.”

“Here’s hoping,” Kate replies.

“Do you speak French?” he inquires.

“Yes,” she replies in French with a slight Corsican accent. “Very well, actually.”

“Good,” he says. “Do not speak English to anyone in this neighborhood. These people believe that I am a French citizen. I will introduce you, if it is necessary, as my wife.” They catch the subway to the Port Authority bus station, where they mill around with the rest of the crowd for about half an hour before catching a taxi which drops them off in Brooklyn Heights.

The apartment itself, beneath a brownstone, is behind a gate and down a short flight of steps, then behind a steel door which leads into an entryway. At the end of the entryway is the actual apartment door. Ari unlocks it and they enter, guns out, checking and clearing the entire apartment before they relax.

For Kate, the first order of business is taking a shower. She hasn’t had one since the gym locker room, and that was nearly eighteen hours ago. She is filthy and exhausted, and she’s confused because she isn’t sure what happens next. So she takes a shower. The warm water cascading over her soothes tired muscles and the time alone gives her a chance to think. When she comes back out, dressed in shorts and a tee shirt, she is ready.

“What do we do now, Ari?” she asks him, standing barefoot in the doorway which leads from the single bedroom into the living room. “We’ve got this stuff, Gibbs is ready and waiting to pick us up whenever we give the signal. He’s not even very far away. Why are we still running?”

Ari, sitting at the dining table, leans his chair back against the wall and studies her. “Caitlin,” he says, “consider this. What will happen to me if I simply turn over this information without some sort of agreement in place for my protection? Your government, the FBI, the CIA, they will thank me very kindly for my help, pat me on the head like a child, and send me off into the wide world to make my own way. I am useless to your CIA now that my cover has been blown; every terrorist organization in the world will have my photograph and my name by now. The moment I try to infiltrate one, I will be killed.”

Kate nods. “So you want to make some kind of deal with them,” she says, understanding. “Witness protection?”

He waves a hand. “That is not necessary. Besides, the eyes of al Qaeda are everywhere. The moment I am seen, whether it is here or whether it is in some tiny town in the middle of Montana, I will be known, and shortly thereafter, I will be dead. The best choice for my safety, for me, is to make myself extremely well-known and valued in Washington. There I can be safely monitored as a person of interest to your government for the rest of my life.” He gives her a slight smile. “Perhaps I shall acquire my very own Secret Service detail.”

She has to laugh at that; the very idea of Ari Haswari being protected 24/7 by the Secret Service is ridiculous. And yet it may be very accurate; if the information that he has is powerful enough to bring down the director of the Mossad, it may well be decided that Ari warrants that level of protection.

He stands, stretching. “Now that you are finished in the shower,” he says, “I believe that I shall take one myself.”

She nods, and then her stomach rumbles. “You don’t have anything to eat here, do you?”

“No,” he says. “If you like, you can call out for delivery. I believe that we are safe enough here.” He pulls his wallet out and tosses it onto the table. “You will find sufficient funds there to pay for whatever you choose to order.”

He shuts the door to the bedroom when he goes in, leaving her alone in the living room. She finds a telephone directory in one of the kitchen drawers and begins flipping through the pages, searching for delivery food in Brooklyn. She finally finds a rather daunting list of available cuisine, and settles on Italian.

She is paying the delivery boy when Ari comes out of the bedroom dressed in jeans and a tee shirt. “Italian?” he asks in French.

“Oui,” she replies, paying the boy with a smile and a generous tip. “Merci beaucoup.”

“Thanks, lady,” the boy replies, then takes himself away, and Kate pushes the door shut and turns toward the table, where Ari is liberating the food from the plastic bags.

“What did you order?”

“Lasagna,” she replies, helping him pull food out. “And manicotti, and bread, and tiramisu.”

“And a very good bottle of wine, I see,” he adds, pulling it out.

She checks the label. “Wow, when I told them to send a nice red, I didn’t know they were gonna take me that seriously.”

They end up sharing the dishes and the wine, and they are halfway through the tiramisu when he reaches across the table and kisses her again.

She is less surprised this time than she was the last time, and at least part of that is the fault of the wine, or so she tells herself when she allows him to pull her out of her chair and into his lap. She straddles his legs easily, settling onto his thighs and wrapping her arms around his neck, and when the logical and rational woman who lives in her mind screams at her that she is making out with Ari Haswari, for God’s sake, she tells that rational and logical woman to go take a flying leap.

She slides her tongue into his mouth, tangling it with his, and seeks out the flavors of the garlic and the wine and that flavor that is unique to him, taking it all in with closed eyes and soft, panting breaths. When his hands slide under the hem of her tee shirt, she pulls it off completely, tossing it away and letting him map her back with his hands. He finds the slightly raised area of the birthmark just above her left kidney; he finds the scar from the time she fell on a tree branch and was almost paralyzed when she was eight. His fingers move up her spine, seeking and learning the softness of her skin, and when they encounter the clasp of her bra, they pause. He opens it easily with a move that feels practiced, and she grins into his kisses as he peels the lace away and drops it on the floor.

When his hands replace the cups of her bra, her head falls back and she gives a whining little moan. The feel of his rough palms on her soft skin is intoxicating, and he knows just what to do with his fingers, pinching and rolling her nipples to make her writhe and moan. Her hands drift up to cover his, encouraging his movements, and he chuckles darkly, leaning forward to kiss a line up her collarbone.

“You are exquisite,” he whispers into her ear, making her shiver at his warm breath on her skin. “I have desired you since the moment I first saw you. Since the first time I touched you in that morgue, I have wanted to have my hands on your bare skin, to hear the sounds you would make when I held you.” He leans forward, mouthing the side of her neck, and she moans, soft and high, writhing in his lap. She feels his hardness growing between their bodies and she presses into him, wanting to feel him there, needing him to relieve the burning between her thighs.

He chuckles against her throat, one hand moving around behind her back to support her while his mouth makes its way down to the breast that is now untended. His tongue bathes her flesh and he takes her hard nipple into his mouth, sucking firmly, making her back arch and a soft, keening cry escape her lips. Her hands come up to thread through his hair, her fingernails scratching at his scalp, and she whispers encouragements into the air between them.

A moment later, he is switching sides, providing the same treatment to the other breast, and she is gasping for breath, each exhalation coming out as a sound of desperate need. “Ari,” she finally whispers. “Ari, please!”

He chuckles darkly and his hands move down her sides, tickling and making her squirm, to the waistband of her pants. He pops the button open and eases the zipper down, his fingers finding the silk of her panties underneath. The scent of her arousal drifts up to wrap around them both, and his fingers slide between silk and cotton. The crotch of her panties is soaked already, and he chuckles again. “Why, Caitlin,” he murmurs, pulling her head down to his. “I do believe that you want me.”

She whimpers, rolling her hips toward his fingers, and he pulls them back, teasing, even as he draws her lips to his in another searing kiss. His tongue invades her mouth and his fingers slide forward again, finding the wet fabric against her skin and nudging it to the side.

When his fingers touch her clit for the first time, she cries out in pleasure. He chuckles into her mouth, his free hand sliding down to wrap around the middle of her back, and then he leans forward just a bit, and his fingers begin to work her flesh, sliding to her opening to gather moisture and then forward again to roll in circles around her clit and then flick across it, seeking and finding the angle, pressure and speed that will make her come apart in his arms. It doesn’t take much, and when she comes, she arches against his erection and cries out in wordless surrender.

When she comes back to herself, she is still in his lap, her arms around his neck and her head resting on his shoulder. Her skin is lightly dusted with sweat, and his hands are rubbing her back gently. She turns her head slightly to place a kiss to his throat, and he arches his neck to give her better access.

She pulls his tee shirt off over his head and her hands begin exploring his chest. She drags her nails up his abdomen, making him shudder, and then tweaks his flat nipples, making his breath catch. She does it again, and then begins slowly trailing soft kisses and teasing bites down his chest. She starts to wriggle backward off his lap, but he catches her hands in his, pulling her to her feet, and then he stands. “Come with me,” he whispers, and he leads her back into the bedroom and lays her on the bed.

He crawls onto the bed with her, supporting himself over her on his hands, and looks down into her eyes. “This is the last chance you have to back out,” he tells her. “If you say no, I will go and sleep on the couch, and we will never speak of this again. If you do not…” He leans down, capturing her lips in a deep, sucking kiss. “Then I will make love to you every night for the rest of your life.”

She raises her arms and wraps them around his neck, pulling him back down. The kiss she gives him is hot, carnal, and full of every bit of lust she’s had for him and been unable to admit since he pulled her up against him in Autopsy and she looked into his eyes. “Promise?” she asks when she releases his mouth again.

Ari slides back off the bed, his dark eyes hot and full of promise, and he reaches out, tugging her shorts off and dropping them on the floor. Then he hooks two fingers under the waistband of her panties, sliding them down her legs and tossing them next to her shorts. She fights the urge to cover herself as his eyes take in her nude form for the first time, and she blushes slightly when he smiles. “Caitlin,” he whispers, “do you know that you are very beautiful?”

She doesn’t quite know what to say to that, and she covers her embarrassment by sitting up and reaching for the button of his jeans. She draws the zipper down cautiously, aware that his erection is straining the denim, and pushes them down his legs along with his boxers. His cock is incredibly hard, dark with blood, and she reaches up, wrapping her hand around it and examining it carefully. She glances up at him with a wicked grin, then leans over to take the head in her mouth, suckling gently.

He groans, one hand moving to brush her hair back, and watches as she slowly takes him in farther, her hand working the base of his shaft where she cannot take him all. She would smile, but she’s too busy reveling in the power she always feels when engaged in this act. She closes her eyes, the better to focus on her chosen task, and revels in the spicy, male flavor and scent that surrounds her.

She doesn’t get to enjoy it for long; in just a few minutes, he is pushing her away, guiding her to lie down on her back, and he kisses her, slow and deep. She parts her thighs for him but he does not enter her body; instead, he begins to kiss his way down her neck. He makes his way across her chest and she gasps his name when he takes her nipple into his mouth again.

When he releases that hard little bud and continues downward, she realizes his ultimate goal, and she blushes hotly. She has only allowed this activity once before; it wasn’t very good, so she never did it again. But there is something about Ari Haswari that Kate Todd can’t say no to, and she closes her eyes as he approaches his goal, feeling the flush burn in her cheeks.

He presses a series of kisses and soft nips to her inner thighs, making the flesh tingle and making her core even hotter, before he finally moves to her center, drawing a slow line with his tongue from her entrance to her clit. She bucks, whining softly, and he chuckles, wrapping his arms around her hips to hold her steady. “Ari,” she whimpers, “please…” and he chuckles again.

“So impatient,” he murmurs, teasing her with another long, slow lick before finally getting down to business. He bites at her labia, tugging the folds of flesh gently, licks at her entrance, and suckles her clit until she is a writhing, moaning mass of pleasure, begging him for something she cannot name. Her cries of “Please, Ari, please,” egg him on, and he gradually deepens his caresses, his thumb finding her clit while his tongue slides into her grasping channel.

She explodes beneath him, her cries filling the room, pressing up against the walls and echoing in his head as she thrashes, her thighs tensing and releasing around his torso and her hips bucking up against his face. When her orgasm finally ends, she sags back down onto the bed, panting, and he raises up above her again, grinning down at her like a dog.

Kate’s eyes finally flutter open and she looks up at him, her gaze heavy and satisfied. “That was amazing,” she confesses. “No one’s ever…”

He raises an eyebrow. “Never?”

She shakes her head. “The first time, it was kind of embarrassing, and he didn’t really know what he was doing, and after that I never let anyone.”

Ari rolls to the side, propping his head up on his right hand and studying her face. With his left, he begins to trace random shapes on her stomach, and the gentle touch sends aftershocks of pleasure through her sensitized body. “I do believe, Caitlin,” he says thoughtfully, “that you have been making love to the wrong men.”

With the sensations his touch is sending through her, Kate has to admit that he may be right. She shivers under his fingers and he laughs low in his throat, leaning over to kiss her warmly. The combined taste of her pleasure and his mouth is erotic to her in a way that she never thought it would be, and she moans into his mouth, her arms coming up around his neck once again. “Show me,” she whispers when he draws back from her. “Show me what it’s supposed to be like.”

“Gladly,” he replies, rolling her onto her stomach and pushing her thighs apart to nestle between them, his hardness pressing against her ass. She raises up onto her knees when he guides her, resting her upper body on her forearms, and his fingers slide between her folds, dipping just into her entrance. “You’re so wet,” he whispers. “A man could drown in you.”

“Ari,” she pleads, and he grasps his shaft, pressing just the head inside her.

“Are you ready?” he asks her. “I will not go slow, and I will not be gentle. I am going to ride you hard, Caitlin, and when I am done, you will know who it is that owns you.”

She whimpers. “Ari, please!” His hands come down on her hips, gripping firmly enough that she will have bruises later, and he thrusts forward, his whole back behind the move, sinking all the way inside her in that one smooth movement.

She cries out, rolling her hips back toward him, and he sets up a steady, hard pace, drilling into her and making her cry out with each thrust, pounding his body against hers. Her hands grip the comforter and she gives herself over to him. His thickness is stretching her inner walls deliciously, and he is reaching so deep inside her she can practically feel him in the pit of her stomach.

“You are mine now,” he tells her, each word punctuated by a hard thrust. “Mine. My Caitlin.” He does something with his hips that makes her eyes roll up in her head, and then he starts thrusting again, his voice a low growl. “Your body was made for me to fuck. I am going to own you for the rest of your life.”

“God, Ari,” she whines. “Please, please!”

“Tell me what you want,” he pants, his hands squeezing her ass. “Tell me.”

“Want to come,” she says immediately. “Please, Ari, please make me come!”

His right hand slides over her hip and under her body, across her belly, his fingers trailing through her curly hairs to her sticky, wet core. The tips of his fingers brush her clit and she jerks, yelling, so he does it again and again. The pressure he uses is light and teasing, and she whimpers desperately. “Please, Ari!” she begs, and, laughing, he reaches farther, taking her clit between his finger and thumb and pinching it hard.

When she comes this time, it’s like a nuclear explosion has gone off inside her body. Her back arches, her muscles seize, and her voice breaks free with a scream of absolute pleasure. Her pussy grips his cock, clamping down hard, and he thrusts once, twice, three times more before he cries out as well, filling her with his seed.

Her orgasm seems to last for a timeless eternity, but when it is over and she falls back to herself, she collapses on the bed, panting desperately. He slumps on top of her, holding her down for a long moment, before he rolls to the side to let her breathe. She moans softly when he slides out of her, and he soothes her loss with gentle strokes of his hand.

“My God,” she whispers when she can finally draw breath to speak.

He chuckles. “No, Caitlin. Only me.”

She rolls over and into his arms, resting her forehead against his chest and closing her eyes. “I’ve never come so hard in my life,” she admits.

He laughs softly. “I told you that you had been making love with the wrong men.”

“You were right.” She knows that if she looks up at him, he will be wearing a self-satisfied smirk and she will be filled with the urge to wipe it off his face, so she doesn’t look; instead she settles against him and lets the post-sex lethargy claim her body. “I don’t think I ever want to move again.”

Ari, grinning, leans down and presses a kiss to her temple. “Then stay here,” he says sensibly. He reaches out for the blanket which is folded up at the end of the bed and pulls it up over them both. “Sleep,” he tells her, stroking her hair. “There will be much to do tomorrow.”

She does. And he does. And for that time, they are content.

 

 

When she swims from her dreams the next morning, Kate is still wrapped in his arms and his scent, and the first emotion she really registers is contentment. She is happy where she is, and if she never has to move again, that will be pretty much okay with her.

She pauses for a moment to consider this. She has never been the kind of woman who believed in love at first sight, but she has felt a connection to Ari Haswari since the first day she met him. She tried to kill him in the autopsy room, but he had been both faster and stronger than she, with greater reach and better training, and when he had held her up against him for that long moment before tossing her away, there had been something in his eyes that haunted her dreams from that day on.

She remembers sitting with McGee in a Chinese restaurant the night after she was kidnapped. After finally snapping out of her reverie in the coffee shop, she’d called Gibbs and told him where she was. He’d come and gotten her immediately, and that night after all the briefings and debriefings, when that look of helpless worry had finally left Gibbs’s face, she’d gone for Chinese with McGee and told him all about her experience – but she’d found herself telling him things she hadn’t told Gibbs or Tony or the director. She’d told McGee about how she felt, riding in that car with her face bleeding and her hands cuffed behind her back; she’d told him what it was like to have Marta threaten Tony’s life if she refused to cooperate. She’d told him about the sound of the gunshot when Ari shot Marta right between the eyes, and how that sound was still echoing in her head.

McGee had understood. McGee, she’d thought, was a decent guy, one who understood about feelings and who comprehended mixed emotions, and who had enough in him to really get what she meant when she explained about how Ari had kind eyes. And McGee didn’t laugh at her, didn’t crack jokes; he simply squeezed her hand and told her, “It’s okay, Kate… it’s over now. Everything’s gonna be okay.”

She remembers thinking that, if she’d never met Ari Haswari, she could easily have seen herself ending up with McGee. He was a decent guy, the kind of guy she could trust and love. If not for Ari Haswari. Because, unfortunately, sometime between shooting Gerald and shooting Marta, Ari Haswari had climbed into her soul and taken up residence.

The heart wants what it wants, and be damned to anyone – including the mind – who tells it otherwise.

Kate slips out of Ari’s arms and pads naked to the bathroom, uses the toilet and then steps into the shower. She stands in the hot stream of water for a few minutes and is just reaching for the shampoo when Ari slips into the humid stall behind her. “Good morning,” he murmurs.

“Hey,” she replies. He snags the shampoo bottle out of her grip and pours a dollop into his own hand, then begins to rub it into her hair. With a soft sigh, she turns and leans into him, letting his strong fingers work the tension out of her scalp. When he is done, he backs her into the spray so that she can rinse. In return, she soaps up her hands and begins to wash him, her fingers exploring his wet skin to the accompaniment of his soft exhalations of pleasure.

She washes his torso and his back, then gets another handful of lather and sinks to her knees, washing his legs and his groin. Then she waits for him to rinse before reaching up to take his morning erection in her hand.

He’s slow to come this morning, probably because of the activities of the previous night, but Kate perseveres and finally coaxes an orgasm from him, cheerfully swallowing when he comes in her mouth before rising to her feet and picking up her body wash. She gives him a grin and soaps herself with her scrubby.

When they climb out of the shower, he pulls a towel out of the linen closet and hands it to her, then leans down before she can do anything with it and captures her lips in a slow, sweet kiss. Then, with a smile, he wraps his own towel around his waist and goes out into the bedroom to dress.

He is on the telephone ordering delivery Thai for lunch when she comes out dressed in cargo pants and a tank top with a button-up shirt slung over it. She collects their clothing, carrying it back into the bedroom, and then comes back out and begins to clean up the mess left over from last night’s dinner. After he gets off the telephone, he sits down on the couch and holds out a hand to her.

When she finishes throwing away the trash, she comes to him and he pulls her down between his legs, holding her with her back against his chest and the top of her head under his chin. “Today,” he says, stroking her arms, “I wish for you to call the director of NCIS. I would like you to explain to him what our situation is, and ask him what he is willing to do to help me.”

Kate nods. “Of course.”

“The delivery boy should be bringing us a clean cell phone. I offered him extra money if he would do this, and he agreed.”

Kate nods and leans back against him with a soft sigh. “You know,” she says conversationally, “if you’d told me four months ago that I’d be here right now, I’d have punched you in the face.”

He laughs. “I could say the same thing, honestly,” he comments, “if you include the part about being on the run from Mossad, Hamas, and the American government.”

She pats his leg sympathetically. “Don’t worry about it,” she says. “All of this is nothing compared to what Gibbs is gonna do to us when he finds out about us.”

The delivery boy brings the phone as requested, and Kate puts in the call to headquarters. As soon as the Director’s receptionist learns that it is her on the line, she is patched through to the man himself, who is standing in MTAC next to Tony. Gibbs is then added to the line, and Kate finds herself recalling long nights spent on three-way telephone calls with friends in middle school.

“I’m fine,” she reassures them repeatedly as she explains the situation. “We’re in a safe location.”

“Put Ari on the phone,” Gibbs demands.

Kate holds out the phone with a sigh. “Gibbs wants to talk to you.”

Ari smiles slightly. “I assumed that he would.” He takes the phone and puts it to his ear. “Shalom, Agent Gibbs.”

“If you do anything to hurt her,” Gibbs says without preamble, “I swear to God, I don’t care who’s protecting you, I’ll kill you.”

Ari chuckles. “I assure you, Agent Gibbs, I have no intention of harming Caitlin. In fact, I believe that she and I are growing to be very good friends.” Kate scoffs softly at that, and he pokes her in the ribs. “Now, are you ready to listen to my request or not?”

“We’re listening, Mr. Haswari,” the director says firmly, cutting off any protest Gibbs may have.

“Very well. I need protection,” Ari states. “I understand that Agent Gibbs is not far away from my location. I wish to meet him and allow him to bring me to NCIS, where I will give you the documentation that I have in return for NCIS’s agreement to protect me from al Qaeda, Hamas and Mossad for as long as necessary.”

“Considering the nature of al Qaeda and Hamas, that could be a very long time,” the director points out.

“I understand that,” Ari replies. “I am more than willing to earn my keep, Director Morrow. I know a great deal about the inner workings of all three groups; you might find my expertise quite valuable.”

There is a long pause, and then the director speaks again. “You’re offering your services as a consultant?”

“I am,” Ari replies. “You provide me with the protection I need, and I provide you with what knowledge I have. Does that seem like a fair trade to you, Director?”

“I believe it does,” Morrow replies. “You have a deal, Mr. Haswari. I’ll leave you to work out the details of your rendezvous with Agent Gibbs directly.”

“Very well. Thank you, Director.” There is a moment of silence, and then Gibbs speaks again.

“All right,” he says, and the anger practically makes his voice vibrate. “Where are you?”

“We will meet you in three hours,” Ari replies. “Be waiting outside the subway entrance on Woodhaven Boulevard. Do you know where that is?”

“Jamaica Center,” Gibbs replies. “I know it.”

“Do not be late, Agent Gibbs. Your promptness will ensure that neither I nor Agent Todd will come to any harm. And do not mistake me; I am not threatening her. Those who seek me will be well aware that she is with me right now, and that makes her as much of a target as I am. They will not hesitate to kill her if they get the opportunity.”

“I won’t be late,” Gibbs growls. Then he hangs up the phone with a vicious snap.

“Will it take us three hours to get to Jamaica Center?” Kate inquires, curiously.

Ari grins. “No; it will take us less than an hour, because we will be taking a taxi most of the way.” He pulls her close. “So tell me, Caitlin: what do you think we might do in the meantime?”

“Oh, I’m sure we’ll think of something,” she replies as her lips find his neck.


	5. Company Man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He told her they would meet again soon; she wasn't sure what he meant by that until he turned her life upside down.

The taxi drops them off outside a subway entrance a few stops down from Woodhaven Boulevard, and Ari leads Kate down into the bowels of the city. They board the train, which is packed full of people, and she stands right up against him with his arm around her shoulders. She glances covertly around at everyone else in the train car and, just before they reach their stop, she pulls him down as if for a kiss.

“There’s a man in the corner who’s been staring at us,” she murmurs into his ear. “Do you see him?”

“I see him,” Ari replies, nuzzling against her ear. “When we get off the train, we will lose him in the crowd.”

The Jamaica Center station is packed full of people, and they ease through the crowd, slipping around and through groups of people, occasionally parting and then coming back together again, before making their way toward the steps up to the street. Kate pulls out her cell and dials Gibbs. “Are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“We’re coming up,” she advises him, hangs up, and nods at Ari.

They ascend to the street level, and several things happen very quickly – so quickly, in fact, that when trying to recall the order of things later, Kate will not be able to recall in what order they occurred.

She feels the pain before she hears the gunshot, but Ari is already pushing her, shouting something in Arabic and pulling his own gun to shoot back. The crowd around them is screaming, and people are running in every direction, and Kate thinks for a moment that it looks like the stock scene in an action movie that takes place on a crowded city street: the scene where hundreds of people are running around screaming while the hero and the villain shoot at one another without anyone ever getting shot – including all the idiot civilians that keep running through the line of fire.

She sees Gibbs come out of the car, pulling his own gun, and hears Ari bellow at him to get back in the car and put it in gear. Ari pushes her toward the car, and she stumbles because apparently the pain that’s radiating through her body is centered in her right leg; when she looks down, she realizes that she’s bleeding, badly, and she vaguely understands that she’s been shot.

She’s never been shot before. This is a new experience. She doesn’t think she likes it much.

There are two men lying on the sidewalk in pools of blood, and Kate realizes that Ari is the one who put them there just as he reaches around her, yanks the back door of Gibbs’s car open, and shoves her inside. He climbs in behind her and hasn’t even got the door shut yet before Gibbs is taking off, peeling through the traffic like a man possessed.

Kate can hear whimpers, and she realizes that they are hers when Ari pulls a knife and starts cutting the leg of her pants off.

“How bad is it?” Gibbs demands, trying to look over his shoulder at them and drive at the same time.

“Drive,” Ari orders him shortly, pulling the cotton away from Kate’s leg and examining the wound. “It’s not bad,” he finally pronounces. “Through the muscle, the bullet exited cleanly. As long as it does not become infected, Caitlin, you will be fine in a few weeks.”

“Nice to know,” Kate replies through gritted teeth as she watches Ari shred her pants leg to make a bandage and a tourniquet.

Gibbs calls back to Washington and advises them of the situation. “DiNozzo. Have Ducky set everything up in autopsy that he’ll need to check Kate’s leg out and make sure she’s fine.”

“Will do, Boss,” Tony replies. “I’ll tell the Director you’re on the way in.”

 

 

The first hour of their trip is spent in almost complete silence. The anger is radiating off Gibbs in the front seat, and Caitlin is in too much pain to try and calm him down. She lays down in the back seat, propping her injured leg up against the front seat to keep it elevated. Ari squeezes her hand, occasionally murmuring something soothing, and every time he does, Gibbs’s teeth grind together.

Finally Ari decides to take the bull by the horns. “Are you ever going to let it go?”

“What?” Gibbs snaps.

“Your pride; that thing we spoke of the night you shot me. Are you ever going to get over it? You’ve gotten your revenge, have you not? I now bear a scar just like your own, and my injury aches me in cold or wet weather just like yours does; just like Gerald’s does. Are we, as you might say, even now? Or would you like to shoot out the other one as well?”

“I’d like to put one right between your eyes,” Gibbs growls, and Caitlin finally loses her patience.

“Could you possibly stop it, please?” she snaps. “Give it a rest, Gibbs! It’s not like you never shot anybody in the line of duty, or threatened to shoot anybody in the line of duty. You were a spy; you know what it takes.”

He glares at her in the rearview mirror. “Just exactly how do you know so much about it?”

Caitlin scoffs. “Please! I worked for the Secret Service when I met you, remember? As soon as we knew I was gonna have to deal closely with you to get the case solved, I was provided with a complete dossier. You don’t think I let you come on Air Force One just because you said ‘please’ with a big fake smile, do you?”

There is a very long silence in the car. Ari studies Caitlin carefully, takes in the glazed expression in her eyes, and realizes she’s just slightly out of her head with pain and may not even realize what she’s saying. “Caitlin,” he says softly, “why don’t you try to sleep?”

“No, let her talk,” Gibbs snarls. “She seems like she’s got a lot to say.”

“She is slightly delirious,” Ari returns, laying a finger across Caitlin’s lips when she opens her mouth. “She is in a great deal of pain, and has lost quite a bit of blood. I do not think she wants you to hear the things she is saying. In fact, I am not completely certain that she is even aware of what she is saying.”

“’M perfectly aware,” Caitlin snaps from behind his finger, but her speech is off, and judging by the change in Gibbs’s expression, he knows it.

“Caitlin,” Ari says with a slight, teasing grin, “if you do not close your mouth and remain silent, I shall be forced to take drastic action to keep you from embarrassing yourself.”

“Oh,” she replies, grinning up at him. “Are you gonna gag me?”

The suggestive tone she has taken is more than obvious to both the men in the car. Ari wonders briefly – crazily – if Gibbs’s cock reacts to it in the same way his own does, before pointing the blade of his knife at her. “Or I may simply cut out your tongue. Be silent!”

She pouts. “Cranky. Like you’re the one that got shot or something.” But she closes her mouth. And if she is glaring at him, well, at least she is doing it quietly.

Just before they hit Baltimore, Ari cuts the other leg off Caitlin’s pants to change her makeshift bandage; she’s bled through the first, even with the tourniquet. She is also starting to look a bit pale, and her fingers seem to be colder than they were. “How do you feel?” he asks her, the first words that have been spoken in the car since he shut her up earlier.

“Woozy,” she replies. “And kinda nauseous.”

“Perhaps you should sit up so that you can see out the windows,” Ari suggests. “It may simply be motion sickness.” He helps her struggle upward, trying to keep her leg elevated at the same time, and ends up with her leaning against him, her foot now up against the window. “This is not precisely what I had in mind,” he confesses.

“It’s okay,” she mumbles, her eyes drifting closed. “Think ‘m gonna sleep.”

“No, Caitlin, I am afraid not,” he replies, jiggling her slightly to wake her up. “You’ve lost quite a bit of blood and your body is in shock. You need to stay conscious.”

“But I’m tired,” she whines, sounding very much like the little girl she no longer is.

“I am sorry,” he says softly, stroking her hair. “But you must not sleep just yet. Perhaps after we get back to NCIS you may have a nap.”

Caitlin wrinkles up her face charmingly. “You gotta talk to me, then,” she says finally, her voice sulky. “’S boring sitting here with you two seething at each other an’ nobody talkin’.”

Ari can’t help but chuckle. “Very well,” he says. “Would you like me to make up fairy tales for you, or would you rather hear true stories from my boyhood in Gaza?”

He was fully expecting her to elbow him slightly and tell him to make some sort of intelligent conversation, so he is quite surprised when she settles back against him slightly and says, “True stories, please.”

He glances sideways at Gibbs, who is studying them both in the rearview mirror with obvious suspicion. Ah, well, there’s no help for it now. “Very well,” he says, considering. “I shall tell you a story. This occurred when I was eight years old. The father of boy who lived in the house next door was also a doctor and knew my mother well, so he and I played together quite often. I recall that there was, in the yard behind our two houses, a large grouping of _nakheel_ – you would call them date palms. And of course, as I am certain you know, boys like very much to climb trees.”

Caitlin nods, rolling her eyes slightly. “My brothers stayed in trees when we were kids. Jack broke his arm once falling out of the big black walnut tree in our front yard.”

“Ah, so you are familiar with the story I am about to tell.”

Caitlin giggles, and he smiles slightly at the sound. He takes up the thread of the tale again, making sure to mention the many times his mother threatened to beat him if she caught him up in the branches of those so-tall trees, and he notices as he speaks that Gibbs is listening. Good, he thinks to himself as he explains about Gamal’s love of dates; let Gibbs listen. Perhaps hearing Ari speak of his own life in this manner might humanize him in Gibbs’s eyes. That can only be a good thing, if he intends to continue this thing he has with Caitlin.

And he does intend to continue it.

He focuses on his story again, explaining how the birds would come every year and eat most of the dates from the palms before they could fall, and every year Gamal was disappointed by the few edible fruits which fell to the ground. “So,” he says, “the year we were eight, Gamal hatched a plan to obtain these fruits before the birds could acquire them.”

“Best of luck with that,” Caitlin comments wryly.

“Indeed. Well, the catapult was not very successful; it frightened the birds away, but because we had only small shot, we also ended up breaking a window in another neighbor’s house.”

Caitlin laughs softly at that. “I’m sure that went over well with your mothers.”

“Oh, quite. I do not believe I have ever been thrashed quite so thoroughly before or since.” Ari laughs. “Well, once we were allowed back outside again, Gamal thought that my bow and arrows might be a better weapon of choice; after all, an arrow would not likely break a window, if sent directly up in the air; the trajectory would be all wrong.”

“You’ll shoot your eye out, kid,” Caitlin comments, with the air of someone who is quoting something. Ari does not recognize the reference, but Gibbs snorts slightly in amusement. Good.

“Indeed,” he says, “and that is very nearly what happened. Gamal carries a scar on his face to this day.” He places the tip of his finger just under her left eye, drawing it down her cheek. “Right there.”

“Ouch. Did you get another spanking?”

Ari laughs. “Not as bad as the first one; I think my mother was just grateful that neither of us had killed or blinded ourselves.”

“What did you do after that?”

Ari blinks as he recognizes the interchange Gibbs is taking; they are now on the Washington Beltway and will be at NCIS very soon. “After that,” he says, “we gave up on creativity and simply climbed the tree.”

Caitlin laughs again, and Ari smiles at the sound. He likes her laughter. “How bad were you hurt?”

“Gamal was not hurt at all,” Ari replies. “I, however, suffered two broken ribs and a sprained wrist from unwittingly serving as his landing pad.”

“Oh, no!” Caitlin gasps, trying not to laugh at his remembered pain and failing. “What did you do then?”

“After I healed,” Ari replies, grinning, “Gamal suggested that perhaps I should be the one to climb the tree. I beat him senseless and spent the rest of the summer reading books.”

Her laughter at his closing statement leaves her breathless, but she is still awake when Gibbs pulls the car into NCIS’s evidence garage. Ari slips backward out of the seat and pulls her out by the armpits, swinging her up into his arms and heading for the elevator. Gibbs beats him there and opens the doors with the ocular scanner, then leads the way into the confined space.

Their first stop is Autopsy, where Ducky and his new assistant stand ready and waiting for Caitlin’s arrival. They swing into action immediately, starting with X-rays of her leg. Gibbs tries to get Ari to come with him – the Director wants to see him – but Ari is not moving until he is sure that Caitlin is all right.

The X-rays show that the long bone of her shin is cracked; she also needs some stitches both inside and outside the wound. She will not need a cast, but she will be in a splint and off her foot for at least six weeks. Ari is concerned about blood loss, but Ducky is sanguine; he gives her juice and assures Ari that she will be fine.

It is not until Caitlin sits up, wobbly but stronger than she was, and shoos him away with a wave of her hand that he finally is willing to go.

Gibbs takes him upstairs in the elevator, studying him with fierce eyes the whole way up. Just before they reach their floor, he smacks the emergency stop button. The lights go dim, and the little box jerks to a halt. Ari mentally braces himself.

“What are you doing with her?” Gibbs asks, his voice low and dangerous.

Ari smiles slightly. “Nothing that you yourself would not have done, if given the opportunity,” he replies. Then he cocks his head. “Tell me, Agent Gibbs; why _haven’t_ you taken the opportunity?”

“It’s not appropriate!” Gibbs snaps. It is telling to Ari that Gibbs does not deny feeling an attraction to Caitlin.

He cocks his head, studying the older man. “I will not hurt her,” he says softly. “Agent Gibbs, I am not a monster, nor am I the Devil. I am merely a man, one with perhaps a more distasteful profession, and perhaps a more flexible moral code, but still merely a man, with a man’s needs and a man’s desires. She is a desirable, beautiful, intelligent woman, and she finds in me a desirable man. Consider this: The harm I did to you, you have repaid in kind.” He puts a hand to the shoulder that still aches in foul weather. “But the harm I did to her, on more than one occasion, she has not seen fit to return to its source. If she, without recompense, can find it in herself to forgive me, then surely you, who have had your revenge, should be able to do the same.”

He reaches past Gibbs to hit the stop button and restart the elevator, and when the doors open, he steps out and looks both ways. “Well?” he asks when Gibbs continues to stand there, studying him. “Which way am I to go?”

Gibbs steps out of the elevator then, his expression more thoughtful than it has been all day, and leads him past a sign reading “MTAC” and through a door which requires another ocular scan. The room they enter now is darkened and built like a movie theater, with a bank of computer equipment to one side. The room is empty except for a technician in front of the computers and a distinguished older gentleman in a suit who sits in the front row of seats, staring at the large screen.

Gibbs clears his throat softly and the older gentleman stands and dismisses the technician. In a moment, the three of them are alone in the room. The man steps forward. “Mr. Haswari?”

Ari nods. “I am.”

“I’m Director Morrow,” the man introduces himself, and Ari smiles slightly.

“Yes, I am aware.” He walks forward and puts the precious duffel bag down on the desk by the computer equipment, reaching inside and pulling out the envelope of photographs. “Here are the photographs I discussed with you,” he says. Then he pulls out the envelope of correspondence, gained at the risk of his own life by sneaking into the Director’s home in the night and accessing the man’s personal computer. “And these are the correspondences.” He draws out the last envelope and holds it out as well. “In this envelope you will find copies of Director David’s financial statements, which show large deposits where no large deposits should be. They correspond with the meetings set up in the correspondence and proved in the photographs.”

Morrow sits down again, flipping through first the photos, then the letters, and then the bank statements. “Mr. Haswari, you’ve done a remarkably thorough job,” he says, slightly surprised and very pleased. “I’m quite impressed.”

“I was simply doing what was necessary to ensure my own survival,” Ari replies. “I have not risked my life for Mossad by infiltrating Hamas and al Qaeda only to sit idly by while I am turned on by the people I am supposed to be able to trust.”

Morrow nods. “And I can understand that.” He stands. “Let’s go to my office and discuss what NCIS can offer you.”

Ari nods. “Let us do so.”

An hour or so later, a deal has finally been struck, and Ari shakes hands with Director Morrow across the desk. “Welcome to NCIS,” the Director says, and Ari smiles, knowing full well the reaction this is going to garner him from Gibbs and the rest of his team, with the notable exception of Caitlin.

“Thank you, Director,” he replies. “I look forward to working with you.” And that is, in fact, the truth. It will be a nice change to have regular employment for once; to see, in effect, how the other half lives.

For about a day. Then it’s going to be as boring as some of his grandfather’s war stories.

One thing it has going for it, though, is that it will afford him the opportunity to see Caitlin every day, even though he won’t be working directly with her. Director Morrow seemed to understand that putting him in regular contact with Gibbs’s team might not be the best thing for the agency. They had, in fact, shared a slight smile over it. Morrow, Ari thinks, is a man who understands about unpleasant duties which must be performed for the security of the nation – of many nations. Gibbs is a man who only understands about pride. It is a failing in a man who has few professional failings.

Ari has a lot of respect for Gibbs, though he’s certain Gibbs would neither believe it nor appreciate it.

He leaves the Director’s office to wander the building while the Director makes arrangements for his protection. There will be, as Ari expected, a team assigned to him for “the duration” – however long that ends up being. Ari suspects it will not be over until he goes to his final rest.

He’s all right with that.

He’s taking things rather calmly, he thinks. He will probably panic later, when he’s alone. For now, he wants to find Caitlin again, and reassure himself that she is all right.


	6. Company Man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He told her they would meet again soon; she wasn't sure what he meant by that until he turned her life upside down.

There is a period of several months in which he does not see Caitlin. This is probably for the best, he tells himself over and over during his time of exile; absence makes the heart grow fonder, if you love something set it free, and all those other axioms which make one want to vomit at their sentimentality.

He does not care about sentimentality. He has always been a man who knew what he wanted, went after it, and acquired it. What he wants is Caitlin, and right now he cannot have her.

This makes him cranky. When Ari Haswari is cranky, it makes his guardians nervous.

He has spoken to her once, though his handlers do not know it. Ari is intelligent enough to manage certain things for himself, and one of those things is getting in touch with people he is not supposed to be in touch with. Ordering the cellular telephone for her was very, very easy. Getting one of his own was not so easy, but he managed it, and the ten-minute conversation he had with her at four o’clock one morning was well worth the effort and the expense. She was well, she advised him, and reasonably happy, though she would be more than glad when she could return to work. She, too, was in protective custody, and would be until NCIS was one hundred percent certain that she was no longer a target of Mossad or any terrorist organization.

Two months after that conversation, he heard that she was back at work. He was glad. That meant the only person he needed to worry for was himself.

Al Qaeda is still looking for Ari, but not as hard as they were; they seem to have picked up on the fact that he’s not in Washington any more, and they seem to be milling about, sniffing after his trail without very much enthusiasm. Finally, the time arrives to give them what they want.

He makes his first appearance in Los Angeles, striding past a storefront owned by an al Qaeda sympathizer without a care in the world – and even pausing to study the window display before moving on again. Two days later, he allows himself to be seen by a financial backer in Las Vegas, standing over a blackjack table with a blonde on either side of him. Three days after that, he’s in Seattle, dining with a lovely redhead at the top of the Space Needle in full view of a man who has weekly telephone conversations with Osama bin Laden. A week later, he shows up in New York, and that’s when the real fun begins.

One thing a double agent learns early in his or her training is how to become a ghost. It is a simple maneuver, yet tricky for the uninitiated, requiring the performer to be in a place and then, quite suddenly, to be gone again, as though he had never been. Ari makes of himself a ghost in New York City over the course of several days. He allows himself to be seen outside an Arabic bodega; he allows himself to be seen in the vicinities of several Hamas, Mossad and al Qaeda safehouses; he allows himself to be seen playing the tourist at the top of the Empire State Building. He never allows himself to be trapped; not even for a second.

Not until he’s damn good and ready.

When that day comes, after he has driven the operatives in the city into a froth of trying desperately to catch him, he allows himself to be caught in a topless bar with a stripper in his lap.

She would be a regrettable casualty, so he makes sure that the fight takes long enough for her to escape with no injury more serious than a bruise on her thigh. She is terrified, but she will live – unlike Ari Haswari, who is shot six times in the chest and dies in a pool of his own blood on the filthy floor of what passes for a VIP room in this second-rate establishment.

He waits for the police to arrive and clear out the room before he sits up, groaning, and peels off his bulletproof vest. “Officer,” he says to the detective who is kneeling over him, “please call this number; there are people who will come and retrieve me. I apologize for the inconvenience, but the ruse was necessary.”

The police obviously want more information, but Ari refuses to provide it, insisting that they call the number on the card he gave them. “Everything will be revealed to you,” he says over and over until one of them finally gives up and calls.

Within thirty minutes, the NCIS retrieval team is there. One of the special agents takes the chief detective aside and explains the situation in a low voice, imploring the NYPD’s assistance in closing their case. The detective agrees reluctantly, and the agent promises to owe the detective a like favor in future. Then Ari, with a comment about being used to the mode of transportation, is zipped into a body bag, and they carry him out.

There is much discussion of the “dead” terrorist in the bag, and one of the agents makes the comment that Special Agent Gibbs ought to be happy now that this scumbag is off the streets. It is said with a wary, half-apologetic tone; he shrugs it off. It no longer matters; Ari Haswari is dead.

Once they are certain that they have not been followed, the driver, who has introduced himself as Agent Balboa, bangs on the partition. “Haswari! You alive in there?”

Ari removes himself from the bag and locates the window in the partition, sliding it open, he greets his rescuers. “Agent Axelrod. Agent Balboa. How did everything go?”

“They were watching,” Balboa replies. “But I’m pretty sure they bought it.” He glances at Ari for confirmation.

“I believe you are correct,” Ari agrees. “It will be necessary to monitor the chatter for a few days and learn what is being said, but I believe that we were successful in our venture.”

“See?” Balboa says to Axelrod. “Dead guy says we did it.”

“Hey, yeah,” Axelrod says, looking over at Ari. “How’s it feel to be dead?”

Ari finds himself smiling. “Most unusual.”

It is late before they arrive in Washington, and the NCIS building is virtually empty. There are a few agents working late at their desks, solitary pools of light in the otherwise darkened area, and he passes all of them without a second glance, heading for the Director’s office.

Morrow is waiting for him with all the paperwork he will need – employment contracts, confidentiality agreements, identification papers, and even citizenship papers. As soon as he signs his name – his old name – he will officially become Jacob Thomas Nolan, an American citizen born abroad who has been an NCIS agent for several years.

He signs with no hesitation.

Ari Haswari bleeds out onto the paper, and Jacob Nolan stands up from his chair, shaking hands with Tom Morrow. “A pleasure, Director,” he says with a slight, sardonic grin. “I look forward to assuming my duties here tomorrow.”

Morrow hands him a set of keys. “Your car is in the parking garage,” he says. “Third level, space twenty-four. There’s a map and directions to the apartment we set up for you.” He holds up a small plastic bag. “And here are the extra items you requested.”

“Thank you for all of your assistance.” He takes his identification papers, the bag and the keys and he leaves the office, glancing down once into the darkened bullpen where he knows Caitlin’s desk sits. Special Agent Gibbs’s team is not working late tonight; even Gibbs himself is gone. He considers pausing to leave some sign on her desk and shakes his head. Tomorrow will be soon enough.

He takes the elevator down to the gym and uses the locker room to accomplish his newest transformation. Jacob Nolan is not a black-haired, black-eyed Israeli man; he has blue eyes and spiky brown hair with blonde highlights. He also wears a neatly-trimmed goatee in contrast to Ari’s usual stubble. These changes, combined with the change of clothes – Ari now wears blue jeans, running shoes, and a yellow pullover shirt with a black stripe around the chest – make him virtually unrecognizable.

Satisfied, he takes the elevator back up to the ground floor and then crosses to the parking garage, making his way up to the third level. He’s on the wrong side of the garage, though, and the space he is at is fifty-four. Looking around, he finds a way to cut across the structure and does so, turning to his left in search of the correct space.

She is sitting on the hood of a black Toyota Celica, leaning back with her torso supported on her arms, and she is watching him with eyes that glitter in the darkness. “Special Agent Nolan,” she greets him, and there is humor in her voice.

“Special Agent Todd,” he replies. “How nice to see you. It has been quite a long time.”

“Yes, it has,” she replies, crossing her legs and shaking her hair back, her eyes locked on his face as he approaches. “Quite a long time.”

His hand falls against her thigh and slides up under the hem of her short denim skirt as he leans down to capture her lips with his. “Did you miss me?” he murmurs into her ear.

“So much,” she whispers back. “Take me home.”

He steps back and lifts her off the car, opening the passenger door so that she can slide in and then moving around to the driver’s side. He pulls out of the parking garage and onto the street and he lays his right hand on her left thigh as she studies the directions to his new apartment. “Very nice,” she comments idly, her hand falling to rest on top of his. “You must be making twice what I make.”

He laughs softly. “Ex-double agents are valuable commodities.”

“Apparently. And oh, look! I just happen to have one of my very own.” She takes his hand, raising it to her mouth, and kisses his fingers. “How lucky for me.” Then the tip of his index finger is suddenly engulfed in the wet heat of her mouth, and he is instantly harder than he has been in weeks.

“Caitlin,” he says softly, warningly, “if you do not stop that, I am likely to crash this car and kill us both.”

She snorts indelicately. “Please. I know you. You have much better self-control than that.” But she lets him go anyway, for which he is grateful; it might not be good to start his career in Washington by pulling onto the shoulder of the road and fucking her senseless on the hood of his new car in front of God and everyone.

They are passing a walled condominium community; she points at its wrought-iron gate. “That’s your turn. Here’s the passcode for the gate.” She hands him a slip of paper with several numbers written on it; he punches the numbers into the box at the gate and the gate slides open, granting them entrance.

He blinks and tries not to be impressed; it’s bad for his image, after all. But he can’t help it. This is a very nice complex. The amenities here are probably amazing.

Not that the amenities matter when she has his finger in her mouth again. She points to a parking space and he sees his name – his new name – painted on the parking bumper. He pulls the car in so fast he nearly hits the wall and shuts the engine off quickly, getting out to the accompaniment of her low laughter. She climbs out as well, studying the paperwork. “Looks like you’re in 212,” she says, looking around and then pointing. “There you are.”

He wraps an arm around her waist. “Come, Caitlin.”

She laughs again. “I certainly hope so.” He draws her up the single flight of stairs to his new front door and she pulls the key out of the package she holds, offering it to him. He opens the door and allows her to precede him.

Her heels click on the tile floor as she strolls through the entryway and into the living room, which has been tastefully decorated in neutrally colored furniture and beautiful artwork. It looks like a magazine spread. He pauses to look around in shock, and only glances at her when she speaks somewhat nervously. “Do you like it?”

“It is very well done,” he replies, looking around and trying to take everything in. “I certainly had not expected anything this extravagant.”

“You don’t like it.” Her voice does something odd, and he turns to look at her, a divot appearing between his eyebrows.

“I do like it,” he replies. “It is simply unexpected.” He moves toward her, taking her hands, and the light dawns when she won’t look at him. “You did this.”

“Me? No, why –”

He cups her chin, drawing her face up to look at him. “Tell the truth, Caitlin. You did this.”

She nods, swallowing and trying to look away. “After I went back to work, Gibbs was still so mad at me that he barely even spoke to me for over two weeks,” she explains. “So Director Morrow co-opted me to work on your… situation.”

“I see,” he says, studying her. “And is Gibbs still not speaking to you?”

“He’s fine now,” she replies, smiling slightly. “Director Morrow locked us both in his office and wouldn’t let us out until Gibbs got everything out of his system. Everything’s back to normal now. Or at least, as normal as it gets, working for Gibbs.”

“Good.” He leans down to kiss her gently. “Now, show me what else you have done for me.”

She drops the pretense of never having been there before and gives him a tour of the condominium, which is three bedrooms and two and a half baths in two floors. There is even a hot tub on the upper floor’s balcony. She decorated the entire thing, she tells him, and while she might ordinarily have balked at such an assignment, it got her out of the office and out from under Gibbs’s evil eye for over a week, so she had thrown herself into the task with a will.

“And the results are amazing,” he assures her as they stand in the middle of his bedroom. “Now, let us celebrate, hmm?”

He draws her to him, holding her in his arms for a long moment before bending to press his lips to hers. She responds immediately, her mouth opening to allow him entry, and a soft sound of pleasure escapes from her throat. Her arms come up to wrap around his shoulders and his hands pull her hips closer to him as he devours her, doing his best to make up for lost time. When they finally part, he looks down into her glazed eyes and speaks in a low voice. “I am never letting you out of my sight or my bed again, Caitlin. As of this moment, you belong to me.”

She smirks. “Actually, I think it’s the other way around.”

“Oh, do you think so?” he replies, grinning, and he lifts her up, tossing her onto the bed. She squeals in surprise and then laughs as he comes crawling after her like a jaguar stalking its prey. She rolls, getting up on her hands and knees and scrambling toward the edge of the bed, but he pounces before she gets there, taking her down to the mattress and pinning her with his body. “I think not.”

It has been nearly eight months since he saw her last, and in that time he has not had a woman in his bed. He is hard for her already, but the moment she rolls her hips back against him, her fate is sealed. He pushes her skirt up and pulls her panties down, tossing them onto the floor, and pulls her up onto her knees with one hand while unfastening his pants with the other.

She is already soaking wet, which is good; he checks her readiness with two fingers before simply pushing inside her with very little preamble. She cries out, her hands clenching in the bedspread, and he forces himself to hold still and allow her to adjust to his intrusion. Finally she moves against him, making a soft sound of pleasure deep in her throat, and he takes that as a sign that she’s ready.

He sets up his pace, holding her hips steady and thrusting deep inside her. She is beyond words already, resorting to whimpers and soft cries, and he revels in those sounds as he pushes harder and harder toward completion.

She pushes herself up onto one elbow and reaches back with her other hand, finding her clit and stroking it with her fingers, and when she comes, he clenches his hands on her hips and fights to keep from coming with her. The pleasure of her muscles grasping his cock is exquisite, and he isn’t ready for it to be over. When she finally comes down, he resumes thrusting, and this time the cries she lets out are even more delicious.

This time when her hand seeks her clit, he slaps it away, replacing it with his own. “Mine,” he growls, curling his fingers against her and making her whimper. He finds the best spot, the one that makes her cry out in shock and pleasure, and he works it with the pads of his fingers until her body bucks and her voice screams out in triumph.

This time, he lets himself go as well, pounding into her grasping channel before letting go and letting his orgasm take him. The world glows white around him and for a very long time, all he knows is the absolute pleasure. Then he comes back to himself with a sudden rush and slumps over, rolling to the side to avoid crushing her. She is still shuddering in the aftermath of her pleasure and he chuckles softly, drawing her up against him spoon-fashion.

“God,” she breathes when she finally gets her voice back. “What was that?”

“That,” he replies, kissing the side of her neck, “was how much I missed you.”

She looks at him over her shoulder. “You’re not going soft and emotional on me, are you?”

“Of course not,” he replies, appalled.

“Good,” she says, pushing away from him and standing. “Because that would be entirely too weird and I’d have to go home.” She strips out of her clothing and goes into the bathroom, and he watches her go, chuckling softly to himself.

This woman is exquisite, he thinks to himself. She is perfect.

He stands as well, stripping out of his own clothing, and pulls the sheets back so that he can slip between them. When she returns, she joins him, propping her head on her hand and studying him. “You think this is gonna work?” she asks him finally.

“The ruse of my death? I do.” He nods, rolling onto his side and studying her in return. “Those from whom I am hiding are not very sophisticated. They see a corpse, and they do not think to make sure the corpse has no heartbeat. The vest I wore was very sophisticated; it held dye packs which exploded when I was shot, providing the very realistic sight of blood all over my body and the floor. They saw the homicide detectives come in; they watched me being removed in a body bag. There is no reason why Ari Haswari should be connected to Jacob Nolan.”

Kate reaches out and pokes him hard in the shoulder. “And while we’re on that topic,” she says, and her voice suddenly becomes slightly hysterical. “Don’t you _ever_ do something that stupid again! Ever! Ari! What if he’d shot you in the head?”

Chuckling, Ari pulls her into his arms. “It was a risk I had to take, Caitlin. I was fairly certain he would not; the head is a smaller target than the trunk of the body. But it was necessary. I did what I had to do.” He kisses her forehead. “If it will make you feel better, I will promise to try and avoid such dangers in the future.”

“You’d better,” she replies seriously. “I mean it, Ari. It’s one thing to do your job, but if you’re gonna be out courting danger all the time, I’m out of here. I can’t live like that, and I won’t have a child that has to wonder every day if his daddy is coming home.”

He looks down at her. “You want children?”

“Well, yeah.” She looks up at him with an odd expression. “Don’t you?”

He pauses, thinking. “I had not considered the possibility.” He is considering it now, for the first time. He can see them in his mind’s eye: a little dark-haired boy, serious and studious as he himself was; a dark-eyed girl as beautiful and fiery as her mother. He looks down into Caitlin’s eyes. “Yes,” he says softly, “I think I would like to have children with you.”

“Well, that’s settled, then.” She smiles, but it’s interrupted by a yawn. She covers her mouth and blushes slightly. “Sorry. It was an early morning.”

He wraps his arms around her, settling her against him spoon-fashion. “Then sleep,” he says. “There will be time and more than time to discuss children and marriage and everything else that you will wish to discuss.” He strokes her hair back, presses a kiss to the warm flesh behind her ear. “Sleep now.”

She does, with a sigh. He lies awake for a time, holding her, before he sleeps himself.

When they wake the next morning in one another’s arms, they make love again, slow and sweet and passionate, before rushing to get dressed and head out to work. They ride together in his new car, and when they arrive at the office together, they find themselves walking into the building next to Gibbs.

Caitlin glances from Gibbs to Ari and then sighs softly, settling her eyes on a spot in the distance in front of her. They wait for the elevator in silence, step into it in silence, and ride for a few seconds in silence. Then Gibbs jabs the stop button viciously and turns to face them. “I don’t like this.”

“You don’t have to like it,” Caitlin replies in the testy tone of a woman who’s already been over this and doesn’t intend to go over it again. “You’re not involved.”

“I am involved,” he contradicts her. “You’re my agent, and that means whatever happens to you affects me.”

She rolls her eyes. “So, what, that means you get to vet anyone I get involved with? You’re not my father, Gibbs. You’re my boss. There’s a big difference. Besides, I don’t see you vetting any of the women Tony takes to bed on a weekly basis.”

“That’s different, and you damn well know it,” Gibbs snaps back.

“Perhaps it should not be,” Ari points out in his calmest voice. “After all, his proclivities very nearly got him killed when the woman he was chasing turned out to be a Hamas terrorist.”

“You stay out of this!” Gibbs thunders, but Ari shakes his head.

“I am sorry that this angers you so,” Ari says, placing his hands on her shoulders, “but it is not going to change.”

Gibbs studies him. “You’re sorry?” he finally says. “Why?”

“Because your anger pains Caitlin,” Ari says calmly. “I have brought enough pain into her life already that this additional stress is unnecessary.”

Gibbs pauses and looks down at her – really looks, for what may be the first time in months. And Ari knows that now Gibbs sees what he himself sees – the stress in her shoulders, the little worried divot between her brows that doesn’t go away, the underlying unhappiness in her eyes. Gibbs is important to Caitlin: she respects him and desires his respect in return, and this estrangement is taking its toll on her.

Ari sees in Gibbs’s eyes the moment he lets go for her sake, and he feels relief course through him. Gibbs reaches out and cups Caitlin’s chin with his hand. “Kate,” he says softly, “are you sure about this?”

She relaxes under Ari’s hands and smiles up at him for the first time in months. “I’m sure, Gibbs,” she replies equally softly. “My gut, you know?”

“Yeah, I know,” he says, and a small smile escapes onto his face. “I trained your gut.”

“Yes, you did,” she says, and her smile is brilliant now. “So it knows what it’s doing.”

“All right,” he finally says, glancing up at Ari and then back down at Caitlin. “If it’s sure.”

She steps forward and hugs him briefly, letting him go before he can segue from surprised into uncomfortable, and reaches past him to push the emergency button. The elevator resumes its upward travel, and all three of the occupants are smiling when the doors open on the third floor.

\--The End--


End file.
